


I see you

by Tarasque



Category: Black Sails
Genre: But the feelings are complicated, Introspection, James Flint needs to get laid, James Flint/Miranda Barlow sort of, M/M, Miranda Barlow Appreciation, Porn with Feelings, Silver/Flint one off, Thomas and James love each other, and Miranda Barlow approves, and some tenderness at the end, but not hateful either, canonical character death (hinted), followed by more introspection, followed by porn, not totally kind for Silver, the porn is mostly Silver/Flint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-30
Updated: 2018-05-03
Packaged: 2019-04-30 06:28:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14490846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tarasque/pseuds/Tarasque
Summary: At the eve of sailing to Charles Town, Silver decides he needs to dig into the relationship between Captain Flint and Miranda Barlow. He might get more than he hoped for in the process - but so might Miranda Barlow and James Flint.Or : what happens when my love for Miranda collides with my need to see Flint get laid sometime between London and the plantation.The fic is finished at c. 20,000 words, I only need to tweak some more the later chapters. Posting should go smoothly!- Chapter two is up. Here comes the porn! And chapter three: Flint's POV, Miranda is back.





	1. Miranda - duel

**Author's Note:**

> My first work in this fandom! I feel so sad that I discovered Black Sails one year late...
> 
> I'm not a native speaker, so please forgive anything weird and don't hesitate to point to any mistake. Writing in this fandom is somewhat daunting, what with all the incredibly literate people around.

Nassau was boiling over like an unattended cauldron of tar, messy, sticky, stingy, smelly, inextinguishable. In spite of the late hour, the press of bodies in the street bordered on oppressive, and it felt feverish, aimless. Whore were forgetting their trade, milling around at the brothel threshold with tense expressions on their faces. Pirates drank too fast, bottle clinking on their teeth, hands slightly trembling, quick to flash up for a blow. Rumours were being traded like precious prizes – no Spanish gold but a hostage in its place, that Vane, no, Flint was going to ransom for the freedom of Nassau, unless he was going to sell her for a price of a galleon, and where was Hornigold in all this, what kind of madman would follow him to that fort? – and despair fought with relief on the beach, while hope was winning in the upper town. Pardons, they whispered. Peace. Stability. Legal trade. Flint’s last, desperate move might save them.

Miranda Barlow wouldn’t even have known whether this effervescence was a day as usual in the pirate town or if it truly heralded the end of an era. But what she knew was she’d never stopped feeling a stranger here and that, today more than any other day, it reminded her of why she chose to live inland – even when it would have been so much easier for James had they settled by the harbour. When they had arrived here, all these years ago, when there was nothing she could find that she wouldn’t call alien, she had looked into his eyes and seen _familiarity_. He already knew of these people. He had _met_ these people, some of them, during the Nassau uprising.

“This one,” he’d said with a jut of his chin towards a gnarled man fixing up a net, “could have been a friend of my grandfather’s.”

It had felt like he’d tried to offer her this. A taste of the reality within Thomas’s vision, ideas made into people with all their imperfections, selfishness and hopes, violent people, scared people, just plain people trying to stay alive, so far removed from the lofty ideals of the London salons. It reminded her of how in her previous, perfect life, she had liked it in James, a lieutenant well-taught and intelligent enough to hold his own in front of a Lord, but who very rarely, in a turn of phrase, a bow made with just a tad too much irony, a barely hidden dislike for any of her harpsichord music, made her sense this other world from whence he came. But on the beach that day, seeing him so outwardly different from these people yet already sliding into their world had made her yearn for Thomas at their side. A man more like herself, and a man only like himself. Because once Thomas had marvelled at James’s ability to know of the ugliness of the real world and still be swayed by Thomas’s enlightened words of pardon; and because now, he would at least have known how James’s despair and fury were shaping themselves into revenge.

Then she had shivered, realising the terrible height from which they had fallen, wondering if she’d ever stop grieving.

“Truth to be told,” James had gone on, eyes fixed on her mouth, which she had been intent would not tremble. “Many of these pirates, they’re not that different from the Navy. Take off the uniforms, remove the Marines that would tame the crew into obedience, seek the men’s support instead. Give them less incentive to sink ships, more to take them for prizes. Not so different. No moral higher ground to be found, perhaps. On either part.”

He’d been eyeing a roundish man with impressive sideburns and inquisitive eyes – the one he’d tell her later was called Gates, whom he had later called friend, and who had died at his hand. His jaw had worked as he’d talked, and he’d produced something that wasn’t as much a smile as a tensing of his mouth, accompanied with that twitching close to his left eye that was still a new thing by then. The man, nonetheless, had answered James’s gaze with an interested nod.

“Some are very different, I can’t help feeling,” she had answered belatedly, and he’d had to turn minutely to take in the extraordinary character she was referring to. His hair was more a lion’s than a man’s, a dirty mane, long and heavy, and he had more muscles she’d ever seen on display on any naked man – and less surface of decent clothing than she’d ever seen on any non-naked one. Someone important in his cultivated wilderness, certainly – but she had never tried to ask James who he’d been.

“You won’t have to live close to them if you don’t desire to, Miranda, I promise you,” he’d said. “Still, an interesting man. An interesting life, possibly.”

And here it was: he saw them, all, and understood them. There was a part of him that yearned for what they had. Was he like them? She had realised on that first day that she hoped not, and had felt shame at being somehow disloyal to Thomas’s memory – no, not memory, he’d been still alive then, _Jesus_ – disloyal to Thomas’s legacy of seeing these people as no lesser men than themselves.

Would they take James in? She’d guessed so. He would be a member of these crews, and soon a leader, although she had been sure that he had no desire to belong to anything nor be welcomed by anyone, so bottomless the grief, so strong the rage, so bitter the shame. But he was too formidable a man for them to ignore, and this detached understanding he had of them was a useful tool.

Would _they_ understand _him_? With the walls he had begun building around himself, she had thought nobody would ever be allowed enough closeness to begin to.

Now, with so many years gone, all she had foreseen had come to happen – and he was still not one of them, not completely, even with all the darkness that had bled into his soul. Maybe because of it. She wondered how much of that same darkness she harboured herself, her thirst for revenge only grown stronger not only with the memory of what they’d done to Thomas, nor even with the news of his death, but with herself the only witness of what it had made of James.

She sighed. That would have to be ignored. Abigail Ashe was asleep, secured in one of the upper rooms of the tavern, and in a few hours, with the morning and the tide, they’d sail. Then Captain James Flint and Mrs Barlow would be gone, possibly to hang, hopefully to some grey semblance of their former life. Then, maybe, James wouldn’t have to drown into his own darkness. The pirates’ pardon, Nassau’s prosperity, those were worthy goals, Thomas’s goals. But what she wanted in payment for Thomas was the price of blood. That she was giving it up was for James alone.

 

The tavern was dark and silent, Eleanor Guthrie having chased the customers out in the earlier hours of the night. James was already on the warship and Miranda should join Abigail and sleep, but like this the place felt a little too much like a tomb and she felt too alive for it. For a fleeting instant, she considered crossing over to the brothel instead, just to see if she could find herself closer to humanity – would the news travel around, would the dear pastor feel some more outrage? But the thought of the street and the many people there deterred her from it.

“May I sit, Ma’am?”

Some of James's men were supposed to stand guard at the door. She looked up, startled, and saw a man whose attempts at being a pirate were recent ones. Somewhat pale eyes, maybe blue or a light yellow-brown, hard to tell in the candlelight. Brand new rings on his fingers, conspicuous jewellery at his throat. Comfortable with his long, curly hair, not so much with the nascent beard. A brash grin that was so exactly calculated that she knew who he was, and why he’d been able to convince the guards that he had the right to pass the threshold.

“The tavern doesn’t accept customers at present,” she said nonetheless.

The grin became wider. “I’m not a customer. John Silver, at your service, Ma’am.”

He gave a small bow that reminded her of how the London street urchins would gratify you with one before scampering away. _Really?_ She thought, standing up and offering her hand, which he took with a contained skill that was at odds with his former bow.

“Miranda Barlow,” she said with her best London salon smile. “Please sit down, Mr Silver. What gives me–?”

“I saw you through the window, heard you chuckle. I, ah – sorry, I wondered at someone finding something to feel light-hearted enough for laughter, in the present situation.”

Why not engage? She felt curious. “I was lonely and considered paying a visit to the brothel. Then I imagined the reactions.”

“Indignation, scandal, spite, from what’s left of respectable society here in Nassau,” he retorted instantly. “Which, from your chuckle, I’m guessing you wouldn’t mind.” He took in a breath, smiled, close-mouthed, with an apologetic tilt of his head. “Incomprehension. Fear, for some.”

“Ah, yes,” Miranda said, feeling the cruel twist in her belly. “ _Witch_.”

“So don’t go, eh? Not where you could upset the Captain’s men, not before daylight when it is reasonably nice and proper?”

She felt a short burst of her old rage, made only more acute with how tired she felt of it all, and pushed it resolutely down.

“Shouldn’t the crew be already onboard? I know Captain Flint is, working hard. Shouldn’t you?”

“Ah. You see, my work for the Captain consists in guessing the crowd’s moods. Feeling what’s in the men’s hearts.”

“Here? Men? Where are they? Or are you implying that in order to know my heart James Flint would need _you_?”

The intensity with which she had proffered the last part made Silver look up toward the bedrooms with an exaggerated expression of concern. “No,” he said. “Of course not. But I’m wondering if I wouldn’t need _you_ to help me understand the Captain.”

She couldn’t place his accent and that made her uncomfortable. Since they’d began talking his enunciation had already become clearer, his vowels more precise. She guessed that he was of the kind that tends to mimic instinctively the other party’s speech.

“What makes you think that I would tell you any of the things of which he chooses not to make you aware?”

Laughter, another grin. “Oh, I didn’t mean it like that! What I’d wish to hear about it small things, details too trivial for me to dare approach him with, you see? Not, God forbid, the darkest secrets of his past or any other ominous tale.”

 _Like Hell you wouldn’t wish to hear them_ , she thought, perversely enjoying the vulgarity of the sentence, then produced a sweet, expectant smile.

“I meant it, when I say I wish to understand him,” Silver tried. “Common men, ah, well, ordinary men, I mean, they let you see something of themselves, whether out of kindness, pride, interest, or I don’t know, anything. Your Captain Flint? Nothing. He’s walled like – if we could use his walls as our fort, even the whole of the Spaniards and the English combined couldn’t take Nassau. And this is the man I have to follow, see? That the _men_ have to follow.”

James rarely told her about the crew. But _Silver_ he’d told her about and in vivid details. A man so crooked it made him right again. A trickster, he’d said, one with such a peerless command of narrative threads and myth building that it made him suspect a more formal education than Silver liked to talk about. Also someone to whom you shouldn’t turn your back, who probably ensured his own survival when taken by Flint’s crew by murdering the man whose corpse he’d been found in company with – John Silver was the name of the cook in the ship’s role and this man was anything but. And finally, he was someone who had saved James’s life. But beyond this, John Silver was the first man that Miranda had heard James describe by some of his physical attributes in the whole time they’d been in Nassau. She’d learned about the hair and the peculiar triangular shape of his face, and the ‘eyes, Miranda, a vivid blue, nearly Thomas’s colour, or perhaps –’ and then he’d pressed his mouth in an anguished line, looking stricken at the idea that he might be forgetting the exact shade of Thomas’s eyes. ‘Just a tone lighter, actually,’ he’d uttered with a huff that sounded like a sigh of relief.

 

Silver stirred, trying for a concerned raise of his eyebrows. It made her notice how deep-set his eyes were, and how this expression made the light reach them – a true blue hue, but less saturated than Thomas’s indeed. It gave his countenance something pure that she was certain was of great use to him. In her former life, such a façade of innocence and such inner wickedness would have been sure to provoke her into seducing him – an interesting man and one not likely to cling or to read more in her advances than what was offered. But now was different, first in that she wasn’t so intent on taking what he didn’t appear to be after, and second in that he was very likely to misunderstand how it would make him stand in regard to his captain.

Said captain whose armour had known its first, if very tiny chink because of Silver, even if the latter wasn’t aware of it. That was, in the end, why she relented.

“Small things, you say?” she echoed. “Ask away, Mr Silver. I’ll judge if it’s insignificant enough to grant it.”

God, was his grin devastating. She’d forgotten how it was to witness such a thing.

“How comes the Captain can cook?” Silver asked with a greedy expression.

“I beg your pardon?”

“The Captain can cook. I’ll bet my life that he wasn’t born a pirate, but a cook? Even I am not a cook.”

She nodded. “That you aren’t.”

“He told you?”

“Indeed. Ah. It’s small enough, I’ll give you this. When we came to Nassau, I had never cooked once in my life. Gardening, yes, in some ways. Pruning the roses is an acceptable pastime in good society. In our new life I planted vegetables. When he was there, James cooked them.”

“So you _were_ a lady. But he was not.”

She snorted. “I daresay he isn’t!”

Silver smiled yet again. “Yeah, sorry, wrong turn of phrase. I meant –”

“I know what you meant. I was nobility, he wasn’t.” Let him infer this, she thought. The commoner stealing the Lord’s wife. The old smokescreen that hadn’t been enough in London but had held in Nassau. The pretence under which they’d be sailing to Charles Town.

He cleared his throat. “Yes. But I wasn’t talking about him being able to boil vegetables.”

She looked down at the muscle definition in her own forearms, at her calloused, reddened hands, at the dirt-ingrained nails that she’d have to make presentable before the end of their cruise. She had liked the gardening, most of the time.

“Fresh fruits and vegetables are a good present to a sailor touching home,” she said, hearing the reproachful note in her tone.

Silver grimaced.

“They are to him,” she insisted. “Particularly tomatoes. And he’d tell you, Mr Silver, that regarding many a vegetable, boiling is the ultimate crime.”

“That’s the thing!” Silver exclaimed. “Who goes passionate about cooking like that? This man knows how to glaze a pig. He showed me a trick for peeling garlic, for f– for God’s sake!”

That aborted fuck was perfectly calculated, Miranda decided. The man was good, and impenetrable. Not the same style, but possibly as tightly walled as James.

“A Navy lieutenant whose only income is his pay has to be his own valet and cook,” she proposed.

“ _Bullshit_.”

She let her eyebrows rise, wondering how shocked he wanted her to look.

Silver took in the eyebrows, went on. “I’ve seen Navy officers live for _years_ on credit, don’t see why he couldn’t have eaten at inns. And so he was Navy, huh? Lieutenant?”

“When the pirates want a naval tactician, they call Captain Flint, Mr Silver. It’s maybe what allowed him to survive all this time. Don’t you think that everyone has guessed, or remembered, that he was once an officer? Hardly a secret.”

“Had his own command? His own ship? Or was it the frustration of serving under less talented captains that made him turn his coat?”

She looked up at him and saw him freeze.

“Didn’t we agree to small things? That’s not a small thing. Why don’t you ask him? As for his cooking, since it seems you’ve been watching him closely perhaps you’ll know what I mean. Which is that when Captain Flint has decided there is something he needs to learn, then he has to excel at it.”

For an instant, she thought she’d got the advantage. He remained silent, at a loss, perhaps, for some other insignificant item to discuss – the cooking was an interesting opening and demonstrated good observational skills, but as he’d said, James’s walls could have defeated armies. Then Silver’s smile turned apologetic before he uttered:

“Like killing? Was that a new skill he needed to learn?”

The blow hit, and squarely. It was the opposite of an insignificant thing. It was the most important thing of all, the growing stain on James’s soul that had finally pushed her to act. It was not a thing most pirates would have cared for. That _Silver_ cared made him very dangerous and made her want to answer nonetheless.

She could have feigned misunderstanding. Lieutenant McGraw had served on warships in wartime. Even back then in London, he had scars. He had met battle, led the gunning, pushed back boarders. He’d fought and likely killed. But not in cold blood, not because it served the ultimate goal, not out of anger, or – revenge. However Captain Flint would smirk and say it was the same, James McGraw had not been a murderer.

She served yet another cup of tea and raised it to her lips, giving herself time. She was realising how desperate she was to have a witness to them both – to have someone know of the whole of their lives, not just the first act like Abigail, nor the second like Gates had for a time; and see them, and judge them, and still declare them redeemable. Soon, too soon, the two acts would conflate, and it was civilisation that would decide of their worthiness – that was, Society, well-bred people in powdered wigs who couldn’t imagine they’d ever need to learn cooking and whose idea of fighting, of _killing,_ included _rules_. This was not her jury of choice.

“Yes,” she whispered finally. “Although he fought hard to contain it he always had a wild streak and never was someone you could cross unscathed. But a need arose for the violence and the killing, and _that_ was new.”

Silver seemed surprised that she had answered. He nodded. “He hates to be seen as the villain. He told me as much.”

“ _God on High,_ _he is not!_ ”

All the Alfred Hamiltons of this world rose in her mind and suddenly her hand was trembling too much and she spilled tea. She laid the cup down, slowly, gripping the handle much too hard in an effort not to let out more of a story that wasn’t only hers to tell.

“And now, Mr Silver,” she said when she felt more certain of her voice, “since we’re reaching territories that we can agree aren’t inconsequential any more, I’m going to ask you to tell me something about yourself. Something true, if you want me to open any more doors onto James Flint’s heart.”

“The question game,” Siver said with a grin.

“A game of truths,” she answered. “So? What say you?”

“Agreed,” he said, but for the first time in their conversation she thought his hesitation was genuine. “Well. I’m – a trickster. As a matter of fact, when I met the Captain, I thought he was like me. An egoist and an opportunist with a talent for making other people see the world the way he wanted them to. And, ah, with other talents that I don’t possess, such as setting a course, handling a ship or leading an assault.”

“Beware,” Miranda said, feeling the exhaustion of the day and the bone-deep weariness of the years, watching the tiny glint, the nonetheless feverish glint in Silver’s eyes, at the same time as the latter said:

“And that wasn’t it at all. He’s not like me at all, I realise. He’s a driven man, isn’t he? A pirate who doesn’t crave gold. Fucking Christ.”

The glint was definitely there.

“Beware,” Miranda repeated. “You’re – he told me a story once, a navigation story. About the largest obstacles in the sea. Islands with steep cliffs, mountains of ice, these sorts of things. They’re big, majestic, terrible, and you think you’re watching them from far enough, if it weren’t for the fact that they create their own current. And when you decide to sail away it’s already too late. Their mass becalms you, and the sea pulls you to them. You might not know how to lead an assault yet, and you might think his drive is only his own, but you’ve already been caught in his current. He might teach you how to lead one day.”

That made the glint disappear and Silver’s cocky grin reappear. “No risk of that, Ma’am,” he assured her. “Anyway, aren’t our hopes that in a few days you and he will be returned to your former lives? I have nothing to fear.”

 “Yes. Of course, and I probably wouldn’t have engaged with you if it weren’t so.” She sniffed. “And you tricked me well! It was supposed to be your turn and we’re talking of him again. You boasting of being an opportunist isn’t any more news than him having been Navy! So. A truth about yourself?”

“You admitted he is a killer, I admitted I am a trickster. I don’t see how we aren’t even. But if it pleases you…” He nodded. “I’m a bastard. Not only metaphorically.” His voice had turned hoarse, strangled, and she looked up to see the flash of fury in his composure. He went on through clenched teeth. “I could give you a name, one that a lady could know, but it has no substance. I wield no power through it and it has no power over me. Is that enough of a truth for you?”

 _But you are a killer too,_ she thought. _And you’re happier and have more lust for life, but there’s some measure of the same rage within you. I see you. And if you knew me better you would know that I don’t judge you. It’s only that if you’re still by his side after Charles Town, I’ll tell him. Whether to warn him, or to tell him that_ here _is a kindred spirit._

“Let’s go on,” she said with a small smile.

He opened his mouth but appeared at a loss about what to say. “I – do you –” he began, then shook his head. “You know what, tell me something small about him. Inconsequential.”

She laughed, briefly, and thought.

“He brings me things that he thinks I need. From his plundering. Crockery. Precious cloth. Marquetry boxes. He brought a clavichord once – this one I did need. And he hates this sort of music.”

“Good one,” Silver said with a smile and a duellist nod. “Poor man.”

“Do you?”

“What?”

“Like clavichord?”

“It’s a music instrument, isn’t it? Never saw one.” Maybe true, maybe not. “Another one?”

“He loves to read, but never cared for what oeuvres well-bred people thought necessary. His own tastes used to lean toward the practical but now they’re more random, coloured by his moods and the people around him. He has to have some personal connexion, someone he loves having enjoyed it, or the seduction of a title, even of a spine. Which is why his literary knowledge has surprising depths and the occasional baffling hole. Do you read?”

“An unlikeable teacher tried to cram some of what he deemed of good taste into my mind. I didn’t like it. I thought it told a lot about his own short-sightedness. I sold the books. Another one?”

There was so little she could say without saying too much. She had come dangerously close to mentioning Thomas together with the books. And when she had raked her mind for some other fact, she’d barely caught herself from evoking James’s shaven face of old sporting that uneven grin, which would inevitably have brought up to whom he had directed it.

“I don’t know, I –” she stammered.

“Then let me ask. How does he sleep?” Silver was bent forward, eyes shining. So many ways to understand that one, most of them open to stumbling.

She chose the literal meaning just to see his face.

“Once, he needed touch and skin, and when sated and content would cuddle to his lover. Watching him like this was the sweetest thing, Mr Silver.” That, she said fully aware, and would observe with interest the effects on her interlocutor – opponent? “Now, invariably on his back, and so immobile it borders on uncanny. And before you think it’s a weapon you can use against him, I’ll tell you that now as well as then, he’ll wake up at the slightest change in his surroundings. Do you sleep at all?”

“Like a child. Thought of something else?”

God, the part on sleeping had brought up how James would have incredibly vivid dreams that he seemed to be able to inflect at will – and would retell to both Thomas and herself. And how if he still had them now, he kept it to himself. But while speaking of their fucking could feel like a weapon, this was out of bounds – much too intimate.

“He –” she hesitated, tried to catch the stammering. “He loves tomatoes.” _Damn._

“Already told. My turn to ask. Do you love him?”

“You – you –” she sputtered.

“Told you I’m a bastard,” he smirked.

“Not fair.”

The smirk turned into a real smile, nice and open. “Who plays fair in Nassau?”

So there weren’t rules, or it wasn’t a game, and she felt _weary_.

“Truth is,” she said as he poured her another cup, “from the start, I wondered.” She drew a rather shaky breath and decided that she couldn’t turn back now. “There was brightness, admiration and a great friendship, and all of it led to love, a great, true love, and sometimes it felt hard figuring where I stood in it. And sometimes it was beautiful.”

She saw that he was not grinning any more and maybe holding his breath. “Want a cup?” she asked to break the tension.

“God dammit no! I – just water, thanks.”

It was amusing how this man had too much manners for his assumed condition. She definitely could see why James insisted on keeping him at his side in spite of all the rest. Kindred spirits, neither completely one thing nor the other. Nor even the thing before that one.

“Now,” she went on, remembering to take a sip from her cup, “now. There’s this great gaping hole and I certainly would wish there were more heat when we fuck, because yes, Mr Silver, we still do _fuck_ –” oh how she loved watching his eyes widen, if minutely.

She cleared her voice, went on. “But he gives me what I need, as much as he can – whether music, books, or sex. Up to that thing right now, that ultimate thing, his surrender to England and civilisation. You don’t know – you don’t know at all, Mr Silver, the pull he had to resist to come to this place – to his present plan.” She paused, drew in a breath. “And I, I – well, I give him tomatoes. Catch him when he falls. Sometimes literally –” she felt her jaw clench at that. Goddamned imbecile of Singleton, imagining his intrigues would bring any good for anyone. Goddamned imbecile of James coming back with his knuckles in tatters and the blood of his enemy still ingrained in the crevices of his skin, murder written all over his features. “I, ah. Keep count of his new scars.”

“Of which there are many,” Silver interjected. “Nobody rises from the dead quite like him, I feel.”

“Of which there are too many.”

“You do a lot of things for him, don’t you?”

“I do. I bear witness to the terrible things that have been done to him. I keep our memories alive. I see him, and he sees me. Mr Silver, I am the last living part of his soul.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” she thought she heard Silver mutter.

“And he’s my only light in the darkness.”

Silver chortled. “Some light,” he said. “Like a burning ship in the night. Or the flames rising from a sacked city.”

She nodded. “That, too. But I wish you could have seen him as a younger man. His light could be – like a sunrise, a sunrise over a very green sea.”

“My God. And you say you doubt your love for him?”

“That’s not what I said. I said I had doubted my place in it. I love him. He loves me, dearly. But I don’t think I’m in love with him. And I think he never was. With time it might have come to happen, once their hearts hadn’t been so completely taken, so utterly full of –” she fell silent.

“A hard man to love, is he?”

“That’s not the reason.”

Silver sighed and passed a hand over his eyes. He squared himself in his chair, throwing his head back like a labourer looking for rest after a long day. His movement brought the light onto his features and it felt he was taking himself back from the dragons lurking in  James’s nightmares, into the land of the living.

“And you won’t give me that reason,” he said.

“I won’t. You didn’t give me a name from your past. I didn’t give you any from ours. But you might still guess, and for the few days during which it still matters, do what you want with it.”

“And what do _you_ want?” he asked without moving his face from the light. “From all of this?”

She heard how close to a sob her own chuckle sounded. “What do I want? Many things that are irreversibly gone or will never happen. What do I hope for, now? Even the smallest measure of peace, for him. For me? I don’t know. Music, maybe. One of Telemann’s oboe sonatas. Or - there’s this Handel piece I’ve only seen in writing. _Lascia la spina_. I dearly wish to hear it sung. By a singer who knows what she does, accompanied by musicians who know what they do, on instruments that aren’t eaten by mould.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Lascia la spina_ is an earlier version of Handel's _Lascia ch'io pianga_. [here as sung by Cecilia Bartoli](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhNRWduBPmY)  
>  Lyrics :
> 
> Lascia la spina, cogli la rosa;  
> tu vai cercando il tuo dolor.  
> Canuta brina per mano ascosa,  
> giungerà quando nol crede il cuor.  
>   
> Leave the thorn, take the rose;  
> you go searching for your pain.  
> Gray frost by hidden hand  
> will come when your heart doesn't expect it.
> 
> And [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uY1XXgCPJs) are a collection of Telemann's oboe sonatas, which are so exactly the kind of contemporary high society music Miranda would have loved and Flint would have had a hard time sitting through.
> 
>  
> 
> Next: the porn :)
> 
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	2. Silver - discovery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here comes the smut.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still not a native speaker, constructive criticism very welcome! Hope you'll enjoy.

John Silver, good-to-nothing sailor, abysmal cook, master trickster and Captain Flint’s shadow, was watching the latter take his leave from the two ladies on the quarterdeck of the Spanish warship. Strange, he thought, that nobody had wanted to rename the ship – she was just The Spanish Warship, anonymous and huge, making the pirate crew look like they played pretend, dwarfed as they were by her abundance of decks and multitude of guns. The two ladies adorning the poop with their dresses like flowers in a vase looked more in their element than the tattooed, scarred men milling around. Of course, he knew why – no pirate would love her. She was no use as a pirate ship, much to ponderous and slow for the chase, too large to easily anchor in remote bays, too immense to handle efficiently. Her role would never be more than a floating fort, an asset in a war, whether to defend Nassau or, in the present case, to scare – he felt a shiver run down his spine. Was Flint really sailing to Charles Town in an effort to offer peace, or was his use of the warship a much more sinister omen?

He looked up again. Flint had seized Miranda Barlow’s hand and didn’t quite kiss it, nor hold it up to his heart – it was a curious gesture, in-between and slow and practiced, and as Silver took in the way Flint’s and his woman’s eyes met he was stricken by the tenderness of the whole picture. Then Flint bowed to Abigail Ashe with something that was unmistakably, even at this distance, a smile, on features that Silver had never seen so relaxed before. The effect was gruffier than what had transpired with the Barlow woman but it still felt, yes, tender.

Of course, the crew didn’t see it like that, nor, it seemed, the girl who would make Flint’s peace possible. For them what took place on the quarterdeck was a play, a fearful captain acting a role by putting on the mask of the civilized man to control a prize. What else could they see, when Flint had been nothing but a façade to them? Silver himself, who prided himself on having advanced past it in some tiny way, couldn’t be sure.

The girl was scribbling on a large book and sending half-frightened, half-angry looks around. As for the men, Silver wondered if they truly realised this cruise, so weird, with a beginning so paradoxically peaceful, was the last – and if some did, why there wasn’t more resistance or bitterness. Were they so tired of this life? All of them? Since he didn’t believe it, he couldn’t avoid – nor tried to, because the feeling was exhilarating – the surge of pride at the idea that it was his own words and actions, not Flint’s, that had made them accept it.

Flint stepped down the quarterdeck and took some time to converse with Mr De Groot, who was coming up to relieve him. Then they passed each other, shoulder to shoulder, and young Abigail actually startled when De Groot reached his station. Silver had been on a man-o-war before – not for very long, because if the press had been a very ugly, unavoidable surprise, the ship herself had not been unescapable. But however short his experience, watching the old master take the watch, with his untied hair, his tattoos and his nondescript clothes, and lord over the quarterdeck like an admiral’s worst nightmare, now _that_ felt like the best fuck-you ever.

Below, Flint was passing his hand over the freshly-painted railing – painting over every inch of brass had been one of the pirates’ first change on that ship, a testimony to their hate of the unnecessary, humiliating, back-breaking tasks the Navy had thought to put its crews to as a whole, and of brass polishing in particular. Maybe Flint had got the same thought about De Groot, if Silver could judge by the half smile lingering on his lips – another smile, what kind of miracle was that?

Something had changed in the way the captain held himself. His back was sill as straight and his stance as alert, but some of the swagger had gone, replaced by hints of the lighter gait of – of what. A fencer? A duellist? A plain sailor? Someone, in all cases, not so intent on exuding menace. Take off the rings, remove the ear stud and the leather belt – as well as the many weapons still stuck in it, remove, all right, a boatload of various articles of clothing, tattoos, curses and mannerisms, and one might find this other man that the pirate captain hadn’t completely obliterated, that he was even, possibly, letting float closer to the surface.

Then Flint shook his head, squared his shoulders and strode across the desk, a pirate again, nodding to the men who lounged about the great cabin entrance. Did they know that the future they were sailing to by the strength of Flint’s will – and the skill of Sliver’s tongue – would be by necessity a Flint-less one? The man would have to take that pardon he wanted for the others in order for it to have any weight – and then, if he stayed around, he’d lose his crew, his ship, his reason to exist, because what held the men to him was, in spite of all his sailing talents and intelligence, the promise of prize money. And then he’d die, hanged by his crew, provoked into fighting by some fame-hungry man, or stabbed in the back by some vengeful one. If he left, which was what Miranda Barlow seemed to hope for, he’d become a lost, powerless soul, vulnerable again to whatever stain in his past had made him turn.

Or, if the Lord Governor Peter Ashe didn’t want to call a pirate his friend, Flint and Barlow would swing.

Now all Silver had left to figure was why the thought bore such a sense of loss.

 

The next morning saw a repeat of the same scene. Flint bowing to the ladies before retiring, De Groot going up to take the watch. But that time, Flint didn’t climb down immediately and engaged in what looked like a spat with the Master. Silver walked nonchalantly down the waist to try to hear more, his curiosity born out of need, he told himself – information was power.

“We have to beat into the wind and you want me to wear her? With that fucking leeway of hers?” de Groot was saying in an incredulous tone.

“That’s what I did all night,” Flint answered. “We made way.”

“Yeah, but it’s daylight now, the crew’s rested and awake enough, and –”

“Listen, I know it’s tempting, but that damn west wind won’t last forever this far into the season, have a little fucking patience, won’t you?”

“Hell, Captain! Patience? _You_ are preaching patience?”

“De Groot, I know you can tack her, we did it in uglier weather and well enough, but this is not a goddamn pissing contest between Navy captains, hear me? Who cares that we reach Charles Town in five days instead of six? Who cares that she looks _good_ doing it?”

“I do,” rumbled De Groot. “That’s my job.”

“Yeah, and mine is to see that everything goes well, the ship, the crew, the plan, _them_ ,” Flint said, jutting his chin towards the ladies with the last word. “She’s a fucking ship-of-the-line, she’s still undermanned enough that I hear _echoes_ when I walk below deck, we won’t tack her, risk missing stays, tire the crew and jolt the ladies just because we can and it’s prettier.” He patted the master’s arm and turned to look briefly in the direction of Abigail Ashe, whose expression appeared notably less frightened and significantly more fascinated than the previous day. “Come on, there’s no emergency. And it might even be in our interest to take our time.”

There were, of course, many good reasons for Flint to take this stance. The most important, maybe, was how time might turn the Ashe girl from a frightened prisoner into an enthusiastic enough character witness. But Silver couldn’t help thinking that the captain had slowed down the ship because some small part of him wished to push the end further back, just as Silver himself.

De Groot, maybe, had come to the same conclusion, because his hand raised in turn to squeeze Flint’s biceps and stayed there for a long time.

 

The next day – how many days were left? five? Or only four? It shouldn’t give Silver such a sense of emergency, but it did – the ladies were back at their quarterdeck station and Flint turned soft and tender again as he took his leave. That lieutenant must have been terribly attractive once, Silver reflected – _fuck_. Where did that come from?

As a fact, Miranda Barlow _had_ taken a blow back then, however reluctant she was to admit it, as many women probably had – fucking _Hell._ When had Silver seen Flint be anything else than tender regarding women – tender, or indifferent? A memory of him kissing Eleanor Guthrie’s forehead came forward and with it the astonishment that someone as handsome, charismatic and in control of his power as Captain James Flint would be the only one in Nassau not to want to go for her mouth, either to punch or take.

Upon reflexion, tenderness or indifference weren’t the whole of Flint’s reactions to women. He tended toward respect, and not in the sense that Society dictated – not the kind that makes a well-bred man pull a chair for a lady and avoid staring down her breasts. No. Flint respected women as equals. He had listened to Eleanor Guthrie’s advice, looked up to an alliance, pushed for her grab for power. Silver would bet he regarded Miranda Barlow in the same way, with the same admiration for her intelligence and independence. The crew would have whispered of bewitchment, of evil queens and their sexual wiles, and right now it felt the furthest possible from the truth. It seemed that Flint felt it easier to take a lesson from a woman – would be much less likely to give a heated answer than to a man’s provocation.

How had Mrs Barlow put this? _They did still fuck. She wished it was more heated. There was a hole._ Come to think of it, her tale was entirely built around that hole. Something – someone? Was missing.

 _Maybe you’ll guess_ , she’d said. And also: _for the few days when it still matters, do what you want with it_.

 

The next day – four days left, the crew whispered – Silver watched more closely. Miranda Barlow’s hand was again in Flint’s. Her wrist twisting, she was playing with the tip of his fingers, tracing the callouses absently, the tender, practiced familiarity as obvious as the lack of any heat. Or maybe there _was_ heat, as their knuckles blanched with the brief, intense pressure they both applied as their hands parted – but the grim look they exchanged didn’t speak of the amorous passion one could have imagined, only of absolute resolve and – grief.

It didn’t make sense. If the pair had eloped, long ago, her robbing him of his good name and prospects in the Navy, him depriving her of an easy, privileged life, there should be resentment – not complicity and acceptance. Passion should have soured into violence, not mellowed into tenderness. There should be mistrust, shame, forced dependency, not that bone-deep, raw friendship that seemed it would survive in hell. And yet forbidden love was the façade they wanted to project to the world. What, then, could be more shameful?

He would have reached a conclusion with a few more minutes of observation, he felt, but then Flint caught his gaze, stiffened visibly and whispered a few words to Mrs Barlow. She froze into remote haughtiness and he gave Silver the most savage scowl he was capable of. Which wouldn’t have given Silver so much pause if he hadn’t seen that exact same expression on the face of a man covered in blood, hovering over the corpse of the rival he had just killed with his bare hands.

 

Yet when the next dawn came and with it one less day in their cruise, Silver was already back to his watching. Again, Flint had taken the last watch of the night, which hadn’t been his habit before and should never be for a captain, sleepless nights and their unacknowledged toils belonging to lieutenants. The crew, however, had left him to it, acknowledging his renewed need for the dark, for aloofness and introspection, maybe letting him slip already from the tangibility of their world.

Silver hated that.

De Groot came up, and Silver was close enough to hear them.

“I wish we could have used the Walrus,” Flint said, his voice rough as he looked up to the enormous array of sails above. “I miss her.”

De Groot only nodded and his hand went again to rest on Flint’s arm.

Concerning carnal appetites, there were many kinds of men in a ship, Silver reflected. Some wanted comfort, release or just flesh, any flesh, and would take a man’s if no woman was available – it was nothing more than convenience and they didn’t see any harm in it. Some _did_ see harm in it and waited for the beach and the whores. Others yet were monks, some, like Billy, out of absolute disinterest, some because of overwhelming puritanical fear – those would succumb, sooner or later, sin worse than the others, and Silver had once wondered if Flint was among them.

Utterly different were the ones who didn’t see other men as mere conveniences. Some wore it openly –  not that many. Matelotage was well and good on a ship, but already weirder on the beach, so that appearing a little too attached, not to say enamoured, marked one as different and opened a breach for attack. Thus the men in the most precarious positions, those who wielded the most power, would often go hidden. They’d shun the casual encounters below deck for fear of being known for them. They’d visit the whores occasionally, all the better if they were the flat-chested, narrow-hipped kind. The less subtle of them would betray themselves in a long gaze or the occasional trailing touch.

De Groot, Silver had long decided, was of that kind. And now it seemed that Flint was, too, although he was even more skilled – supremely so – at hiding it.

That left men like Silver, who himself had visited the whores of Nassau a grand total of twice if you excepted business, and who hadn’t felt comfortable enough for a quick fuck at sea even once. His attraction to men was more than balanced by what he felt for women, he’d concluded long ago, and its dangers justified that he’d never acted on it. But now there was Flint, and Silver felt his sense of loss increase tenfold.

 _Beware_ , Miranda Barlow had said. _You’ve already been caught in his current_. And again: _for the few days when it still matters, do what you want with it_.

He’d never been more afraid of doing what he wanted in his whole fucking life.

 

The next day the weather took a less balmy turn, the wind turned back to the hoped-for south-east, De Groot prevailed as far as speeding up the ship, and Nicholas Irving fell to his death because of Silver’s miscalculation. It made watching Flint less about fascination and more about survival.

 

He didn’t want to observe Flint too conspicuously the day after, and yet here he was, standing in the gloom of the waist, the dawn only a faint promise in the east. De Groot came out only marginally less early to lean over the quarterdeck railing and watch the ship’s non-inconsequential wake, side by side with Flint.

“She’s doing good for a ship her size,” Flint said after what looked like a long, comfortable silence.

“She sure does,” answered De Groot. “We’ll touch land with the tide tomorrow morning, barring any surprise.”

Flint only grunted.

“No need for the two of us here,” De Groot went on. “Go below, Captain. If you’re asleep on your feet tomorrow that won’t help us.”

Flint looked up to the rigging, down to the wake, nodded.

“The ladies will be here shortly, I guess. You think you can handle them too?”

“Oh,” De Groot chuckled. “Looks like the Ashe girl has stopped thinking I eat children for breakfast. I’ll manage.”

Flint smirked, then made an all-encompassing gesture to the ship that ended with his hand on the old Master’s shoulder.

“Don’t tack her more than necessary, hear me? Thank you, Mr De Groot.”

He stepped slowly down the ladder and when he paused at its bottom, Silver would have sworn it was to send a suspicious look to the shadow where he was hiding.

 

With the ladies onboard, the vanguard had been relocated in the forecastle again. Flint would be alone in his oversized cabin, preparing himself for a nap, pouring a drink. Silver nearly stepped forward to follow, then caught himself. Most probably, he’d be with his women, eating breakfast – or even having some kind of respectful puritanical sex with Miranda Barlow, because Silver had been known to be wrong before. Or he’d be in one of his gloomy moods and what Silver had in mind – but what was it exactly? – would only serve to push him to murder.

It felt like swimming up to a great shark for cuddles, Silver thought, standing for God knew how long in his recess, until the sky went pink and the sea dark red, until the bell rang, until the sun rose and Abigail Ashe erupted on the desk, laughter in her wake.

“I’ll be with you shortly,” Miranda Barlow called after her. “I only have to find my kerchief!”

On the other hand, how would Silver feel in two days’ time with Flint gone or bonding with governors, and himself knowing he’d been so close to solve the puzzle but had balked at the last possible moment? Especially now that he knew Flint would be alone over there?

His feet took him to the great cabin all by themselves – passed Miranda Barlow on his way, no time to assess the look she sent him – his hand knocked on the ornate door before he could even think of a plan.

Didn’t matter, he told himself. Flint would be asleep or unwilling to bother with a visitor. Silver would wait for the few heartbeats it took him to decide he’d done all he could, then he’d retire unseen. Only the minimal amount of regrets, and none of –

“Give me a moment!” Flint’s voice shouted, and before Silver could even complete an about-turn, as the bolt clicked open: “Miranda, are you making a habit of knocking when I – hell. Silver?”

In a flash, Flint’s stance shifted from facing and open to that fighter’s posture he defaulted to so often, his body presented in profile, powerful and not quite coiled for attack, his head held high, his chin down, his eyes opaque and evaluating. That he still managed to radiate strength and menace was a testimony of how great his hold was on Silver’s mind – on any member of this crew, really – because the only weapon in his hand was a washing cloth and he stood there with his hair dripping wet, long, elegant feet bare and well planted on the floor, ankles, calves, knees, thighs equally naked –  slender ankles, which Silver knew about since they’d gone two against God knew how many to take the Spanish warship, shapely calves, strong thighs, and the whole of it freckled and dusted with red hair that didn’t even darken from the rivulets of water meandering down.

The shirt he wore was white, a fact that Silver stored in a corner of his mind to consider and contrast with the perpetually dark attire Flint seemed to favour in public, and it also had been pulled on in a hurry. The open collar revealed the same freckles and red hair on his torso, up to the mesmerizing hollow of his bared throat, and the fabric clung to the wet muscles of his shoulders and arms, to powerful pectorals whose nipples, Silver decided, might be a deep pink rather than the brown of men of darker complexion.

“Well,” Flint said, taking a step back and opening the door wider. “Come in, then.” The skin of his face was too ruddy from a life at sea to betray anything, but the rest of him was still pale and Silver wondered if the flush adorning his throat and neck came from an energetic washing or some unknown emotion.

Silver walked in, closed the door. He was staring, fully conscious of it and completely powerless to stop. Not at all like swimming to a shark. Flint was a lion, red-maned and haloed a deeper red by the eastern light seeping through the windows, scarred and maybe turned a little mad from his wounds, and made only more dangerous by them.

Flint cleared his throat. “Pardon the impropriety,” he said with maybe too much crispness for it not to be tainted with irony, gesturing at himself with his cloth. “One of the redeeming qualities of a ship of the line, being as she is so huge and undermanned, is the volume of water she can take. Can’t remember ever having the luxury of washing so thoroughly at sea before.” He blinked the excess of wetness from his eyes, droplets clinging to pale lashes, and licked the water running from his moustache into the corner of his mouth. “And with freshwater.”

He turned his back to Silver, looking, if anything, slightly self-conscious or at least uncomfortable, and walked to hang the cloth beside the washbasin. His shirt was barely long enough to protect his modesty and clung to buttocks that Silver wouldn’t have imagined so rounded. How peculiar, he thought, that his mind still insisted they were here to solve a riddle and hack at Flint’s walls, when his cock was after an entirely different goal.

“So,” Flint said, turning again. “What was so important that it made you intrude only to finally, _finally_ lose your tongue?”

Silver knew no artful way to get at it, he realised too late. There might be a few, for the kind of men he thought Flint belonged to – but he had no way to guess. He looked around. At least the cabin was large and Flint’s weapons carefully stored against the wall, far enough that Silver would be out before Flint was on him. But what safety would the enclosed world of a ship bring if the Captain went after him? People had died from unearthing his secrets. He gulped.

“Are you attracted to men?” he heard himself ask.

 _Fuck_.

At least he’d go to his death knowing that beholding the wealth of emotions passing through Flint’s face and whole body had been worth it – somewhat; he still wanted to live.

Outrage, anger. So much anger, Flint’s nostrils flaring and white, scarred hands balled into fists. But, and this was where it frightened Silver the most, no rage, no madness, no frantic rush to a knife. Calculation instead, a careful studying of his opponent – had Gates found himself the recipient of such a stare before his neck had broken? Something deeper and more animalistic that turned Flint’s breathing louder and his eyes darker, greener. An unexplained glance to the partition that separated the great cabin from the captain’s – weren’t the ladies lodged there? – accompanied with a huff of dark laughter and a flash of anguish in the tensing of his forehead. But no indignation that Silver could discern and only the barest amount of surprise, the reaction of a man who knows this kind of secret can’t last forever and who has schooled himself not to flare off at its reveal.

“What the fucking hell are you trying to do here?” Flint asked in a perfectly controlled tone, letting just the right amount of menace out.

 _That’s it_ , Silver lectured himself. _Don’t move. You don’t bolt in front of an untamed beast. Show your fear, yes, because he’d know anyway – but show him that you’re not a danger or an enemy. Stand still and let him come to his own conclusions._ He felt sweat beading at the nape of his neck, immobility the hardest task he’d ever put himself to.

“Am I wrong,” Flint started again, “in thinking the question of whether I fancy _you_ is a part of this oh-so-artless enquiry, Mr Silver?”

“Well,” Silver began, very aware of how his cock was filling in in his trousers and of how, in spite of their looseness, it could but show. Before, he’d thought that mouth-watering was only a figure of speech – fuck, not anymore. He swallowed. “Yes. Part of, yes?”

He smiled and tilted his head, trying to make himself small and inconsequential, not worthy of anger. A trickster that wasn’t even that good, showing all his cards at once, not one ace left in his sleeve.

Flint bared his teeth in some sort of rictus and began to move – not quite toward Silver, whom he passed with a wide berth to get to the door and bolt it. Silver turned to watch him – not a man trying to tame a beast, but two beasts circling each other, or two men, wondering whether this would end with fucking or in death.

“Good,” Flint said finally. “Because that might, I say _might_ be the part you get an answer for. Beyond that – no confession from me. So please tell me: why do you think that me liking men should translate into me liking you?”

“I’m in the perfect place to know that given the right, uh, leanings, fascination leads easily to desire.”

“And you think I’m, what, _fascinated_ by you?”

Silver grinned, made his eyes wide and clear. “Interested at the least, Captain? I know you look at me.”

Flint was aroused, fucking aroused with the flush on his throat gone ten shades darker and his poor drenched shirt quite failing to hide the state of his jutting, swollen cock. But what was fascinating indeed – maddening, spectacular, _erotic_ – was that it didn’t show at all in his face. His eyes were still calculating and his mouth fixed in a slight sneer, and even his voice didn’t waver one iota.

Flint took one step closer to Silver. “And you would be fascinated by me, if I follow you.”

 _Good God, that voice_. Silver stepped forward and raised his hands in his familiar gesture of appeasement. They were very close now, so close indeed that upon lowering his hands he ended resting them half on Flint’s shoulders, half on his shirt-moulded chest. There were goosebumps on Flint’s clavicles and neck, from the chill of the wet fabric, from desire. He cleared his throat. “You are a very fascinating man.”

Flint bent forward and took Silver’s mouth.

Kissing chapped lips, that was nothing new. Kissing hard – some women Silver had known were positively savage. But there came that growl, very low and rumbling, that no woman could have uttered, and as their lips smashed together Flint’s beard rasped the sensitive edge of Silver’s lips, and Silver’s cock _jumped_.

Another cock, _Jesus fucking Christ_ , Flint’s cock, rock hard, went to press tight into the hollow of Silver’s hip, and Silver had only to shift minutely to align his own, couldn’t help the rutting upwards, the hiss of pleasure. Calloused, very male hands took hold of his face, the split skin of the fingers snagging in his hair, the kiss deepening – a taste of rum, sour and spicy, from Flint’s mouth, and the smell of his skin, soap, already a hint of sweat, and a lingering undercurrent of gunpowder. The hands were now roaming, pushing through hair, grabbing hard at the muscles at the nape of his neck, fighting against the ties of his shirt collar – “fucking hell, Silver, what’s that knot?” – gaining entrance to knead and rake his nails around a nipple.

Silver’s found that his own hands had gone to the small of Flint’s back, pushing up his shirt and digging his fingers at the joint between arse and back, pulling Flint’s groin closer, impossibly closer and tighter, until he couldn’t even rut against him anymore, just push in and push again, stutters of his hips that he couldn’t control. He remembered to open his eyes and saw Flint’s, so close, intense, watching, and that nearly pushed him over the edge. He had to think of evil disgusting things, the bilgewater in the hold, that fucking inedible pork he hadn’t really cooked, just to avoid spilling right then like a virgin boy, in his trousers with Flint’s naked cock right there to the other side.

Flint pushed them a hairwidth apart, his hands still taking in the shape of Silver’s shoulders, one of them trailing down to test the bulk of his torso, the firmness of his stomach.

“It’s astonishing,” he murmured, “how you like to make yourself appear small – soft, unfit to fight, cowardly, frail – when you’re nothing like that at all, are you?”

“Means I’m alive,” Silver mumbled, right when Flint stepped back with a rather shaky sigh. Silver groaned at the loss.

“So you want that, hm?” Flint asked. “Fucking. And you’re bloody inexperienced.”

“Hey, what–?”

“With men, I mean.”

“That’s the way I asked you, makes you think that?”

“Yeah. Also how you reacted right now. Ever fucked a man? Got fucked?”

Silver shook his head.

“Thought so. Sucked a cock? Shit. Just fucking held a cock that wasn’t yours?”

“Uh. No.”

“Out of shame?” Flint asked, but his voice was surprisingly soft and without judgement.

“Out of fear! That shit can get you hanged.”

“Won’t fault you here. You still want to go on?”

“Fucking hell, sure!”

“All right.”

Flint turned and walked to the desk, wobbling maybe a little. He retrieved a vial, shook it, grimaced and laid it back down, took a larger bottle.

“Lamp oil,” he said, coming back. “Works well enough.”

Silver eyed the liquid suspiciously, wondering what well enough could mean. Flint grinned, a flash of teeth that illuminated his face.

“Well, Mr Silver,” he said. “Given your inexperience, and my, shall we say, eagerness, not to mention my state of rare and pristine cleanliness, I think it’s best if you fuck me.”

“What?” exclaimed Silver.

“As in penetrating me. Or is sodomy out of bounds? There are other ways if you don’t –”

“I – no, I mean, I sure would love to – but you’re _Captain Flint!_ And you want _me_ to bugger _you?_ ”

Flint’s smile got only larger – that lieutenant, Silver thought again, must have been _beautiful_.

“Yes, I’m Captain Flint. At least for as long as this crew thinks I’m useful. And I also happen to enjoy a cock up my arse.”

Silver would have lied if he had said the idea didn’t send a shiver of _want_ through his spine. His cock, which had flagged somewhat during their exchange, gave a vigorous twitch that wasn’t lost on Flint.

“Come on,” the latter said, enveloping Silver in a one-armed embrace and kissing him in the neck. “This cabin has a bunk and it’s fucking wide. Let’s get you off these clothes, yeah, then sit over there? I’d like to do some other debauched things to you first.”

Silver turned his face to steal a sloppy kiss and trailed his hand down the inside of Flint’s naked thigh, eliciting a shiver and a curse. “Take off that wet shirt of yours, too?” he countered. “Can’t be comfortable and I’d prefer you naked. I want to see that lovely prick of yours when it’s not playing hide and seek with the hem.”

“Fuck”, Flint only said in a strangled voice.

His shirt was soon a puddle of fabric on the floor, a stark contrast with the maniacal tidiness of the rest of the cabin, and Silver’s clothes followed shortly.

“There,” Flint rumbled, and pushed Silver backward until he toppled over onto the bunk.

Silver looked up to the man who loomed over him, to his wide shoulders and his scars, his freckles, the powerful torso that tapered down nicely, the hint of softness at his hips, the proud, long cock in its ginger nest. “You’re fucking beautiful,” he said.

“Yeah,” Flint echoed, following the tan line across Silver’s clavicles with the tip of two fingers, adding his lips for a shower of small kisses. “You, too.”

But it seemed Flint’s plan wasn’t to lie alongside Silver on the bunk, as his mouth was definitely travelling lower, making a detour by the very edge of an armpit, mouthing and kissing there – who did this? It tickled and felt weird, in a good, no, in a bloody lip-biting, toe-curling way – stopping to lick and nibble at a nipple. And his body was sliding down too, the hair on his belly scraping against Silver’s increasingly leaking cock, his hands rubbing along Silver’s sides, drawing circles on his outer thighs, then inside, brushing his balls.

“What are you –? You going down on me?” Silver said, voice thick.

Flint looked up and raised an eyebrow.

“What does it look like?”

“Wait, I can do that! I mean, sucking you. You don’t have to –”

“You just told me you never have.” He licked his lips, stooped to plant a kiss, wet and promising, right at the joint between thigh and hip, and another, closer to the root of the cock, nuzzling into the dense black curls, his breath hot on Silver’s skin.

“I had it done to me often enough that I can guess how I should – please, let me?”

Flint’s cock, that Silver could just make out from his reclining position, stirred hopefully at that, and Flint himself uttered some kind of little half whine, half groan – but then he shook his head.

“Listen, some other time? Right now I’m so starved that if you suck me I can’t last.”

“So what? That’s not –”

“I want to come with you in me. I – please, Silver.”

“And what makes you think _I_ will last?”

Flint smiled, then laughed outwardly.

“You’re, what? A good ten years younger than I? How’s your recovery time?”

Silver nodded and grinned wolfishly. “Very short.”

Flint, Silver reflected as the former went back to his ministrations, fucked like he chased prizes. Brilliantly, with a plan, and drunk on the gambling chances he took.

 

“One last thing–”

“Fucking _Christ_ , Flint!” Silver whined as Flint pulled off from the delicious things he was doing between Silver’s legs. He tried to push Flint’s head back down, hand tangled in the clean-soft strands of his hair.

Flint freed himself from Silver’s clutch. “Can you shut your mouth when you fuck?”

“Goddamn hell, I’m not the one who’s talking!”

“Talking’s good. That’s shouting we can’t afford. You need a gag?”

Silver sighed in frustration. “Fuck, I can manage. Whose delicate sensibilities are you trying to preserve? The ladies’, or De Groot’s?”

Flint smirked. “Yeah. Them, too. The whole ship, really. That –” he gave a leisurely sweep to his own cock and Silver could see that it was still as reddened and hard as before, curving up along a thigh that shook a little – “isn’t something we need to advertise to the crew.”

He straightened up on his knees and nodded, stroking Silver’s cock now with the same lazy slowness, smiling at the eager cant of his hips. “You’re gorgeous, you know? Spread like that on my bunk, under my hand –”

“ _Fuck_ , Flint, not your hand, your _mouth_ , shut it up and go down, ah, shit, no, open it, dammit–”

“All right,” came the slightly choked answer, and in the sweep of Flint’s eyes over Silver’s body, in the tilt of his head and the hitch of his breath, Silver wondered if he couldn’t read what he had witnessed on the quarterdeck, a hint of that puzzling tenderness.

 

 _Captain Flint_ kneeled between Sliver’s thighs making obscene slurping sounds and Silver still couldn’t believe it. He had to strain upward and watch, and what he saw made him buck up his hips, taking Flint by surprise on the downstroke, driving his cockhead deep into the back of Flint’s throat. He felt Flint’s protest more than he heard it, a half-choke and the buzz of a swallowed curse on the skin of his prick, saw the eyes, now sea-green and dark, shoot up and watch between strands of wet hair. Sweat, beading on the temples, was now mingling with the water of his washing, and more sweat was tricking down his shoulder blades.

The powerful shoulders rolled, strong hands pinned Silver’s hips to the bed. Flint pulled off, a string of saliva still connecting Silver’s angry, yearning cockhead to the corner of his lips. “Easy,” he rumbled, his breath hot on Silver’s thighs, chill on his cock, until a hand went to replace the mouth, sliding up – not strong enough, _fuck_ – and twisting over the head. The other hand came up to Silver’s mouth, pushed for entrance. “Want a finger?” Flint asked.

“Uh?”

“A finger, up?”

“Fuck,” Silver panted. “Yeah. Do it. Come on, do it!”

Flint knew very much what he was doing, no doubt about it, his mouth back to taking care of the tip of Silver’s cock, his tongue rasping and slurping and poking at the slit, one hand making up for the length he couldn’t take in. And now his other hand was down, rolling Silver’s balls – they tensed up, right when a new rush of saliva flowed Silver’s mouth – and drawing light, maddening circles over the tender hot yearning skin of his perineum, saliva-slick fingers caressing on, and on, and backwards, over and around his rim, straying off to brush at his inner thighs, going back up to Silver’s mouth for more slick, and back down, finally breaching his hole. It was just the tip of his middle finger, teasing inside, pulling off, and then the whole of it pushing back in with more intent, exploring to find the exact spot. And meanwhile Flint’s mouth was still working on, his head bobbing up and down with a hastening rhythm.

Flint _was_ after Silver’s control, he so obviously wanted to make him come here and now, and because of it, because Silver hated to be overtaken and guided into someone else’s plan, he forced himself to become aware of each and every little trick of Flint’s skilled mouth, and resisted.

Until Flint went up for air, gulped in, and bore down, right when his finger found the spot inside Silver’s arse. At his first attempt he took in more of Silver’s cock than the latter could have thought possible, down enough for his beard to brush and rasp against the joint between thighs and groin, and Silver strained to watch his face, to witness eyes that finally scrunched closed, tears beading at the corners, a mouth that rounded perfectly around the root of his cock, a throat that tried to work for air even though no air could come through. But to Silver’s marvel he didn’t choke and bore the strain, his free hand looking for purchase on Silver’s thigh, digging his fingers in with oblivious strength. Only whores did this, the expensive kind, Silver thought, and men who when they wanted to learn a skill didn’t stop until they reached perfection.

Flint pulled off for air, the green of his wide-open eyes striking against the red of his skin, breathed deep and came down again. This time, when Silver’s cock was lodged as far as possible into his throat he swallowed around it, and, impossibly, it went further down, until Silver was sheathed to the hilt. Flint swallowed again and Silver couldn’t think anymore, so incredible the sensation, Flint’s throat working around his cock, wet, choked, willing. Silver threw himself back on the bunk, twisting his fingers into the bedsheet, unable not to thrash around, feeling his hips pump up of their own accord, fucking Flint’s mouth, fucking Flint’s _throat_ , hearing the obscene grunts and gurgles he made, the stuttering gulps of air he managed to take.

“I’m close,” Silver managed to breathe out, remembering not to shout, “coming, _shit_ –”

He tried to pull out because that was his _Captain_ kneeling with a throatful of dick, but Flint bore down even deeper, pinning Silver’s hips with all the strength of his upper body, and swallowed, swallowed every spurt and drop of Silver’s load as Silver felt like howling and could but whine and hiss his orgasm through clenched, aching teeth.

 

Flint threw himself sideways onto the bunk, panting.

“Feeling smug, Captain?” Silver asked, watching him lick his red, spit-slicked lips and pass a hand over his red, sweat-glistening face.

“Feeling glad,” Flint amended, his voice raspier than Silver had ever heard it. “Fuck, I’m out of practice.”

“Jesus, out of – what? What the fuck, out of practice? You fucking – you fucking incredible, impossible man. Who taught you that?”

But as soon as it was out Silver measured his mistake. Flint’s forehead creased and the fearsome mask fell back on his features, darkness of another kind invading his eyes. He shook his head, and for a fleeting moment Silver grieved an arse that he’d never get to fuck.

Then Flint shifted on the narrow bunk, sweat-sticky limbs draping over Silver. “Come here” he rasped, low, and while his gaze was still opaque his forehead had slackened. Silver drew him closer and upon an impulse kissed him, sweeter, softer than earlier, with their tongues tasting – semen, sweat, yearning – rather than warring with each other. They kept at it for a long time, trading sloppy, noisy kisses, Silver in that floating state between satiation and desire and Flint’s erection less imperious but still poking into Silver’s side in a lazy, unhurried rhythm.

Flint had one of Silver’s nipples under his fingers and seemed to relish the small grunts of pleasure his thumbing produced. He himself didn’t seem so sensitive in the same area but Silver had soon found other places that made him twitch and tremble, some strange enough – his ears, the joint between neck and shoulder, the inside of an elbow. But what Silver couldn’t help was coming back to his face, relishing the rasp of beard against beard, the scrape of his lips on the bristles of Flint’s jaw.

“Let me see,” Flint said, pushing an insistent thumb across Silver’s kiss-swollen mouth. “Mmh. Beard burn. You like that? ‘m guessing you’ve got a few of the same scrapes down below.”

His free hand glided down, went to press over the upper part of Silver’s thigh in an obvious attempt at assessing the state of his recovery. Silver, who was well on his way but maybe wished to make Flint pay for undoing his control earlier, pulled away.

“Am I to guess that it’s taking you more time than I was promised, Mr Silver?” Flint asked, and Silver was perversely glad to hear the slight hitch of want in the apparent levity of his tone.

“Something not quite going according to the plan?” Silver asked innocently, batting away Flint’s insistent hand. “ _Keep wondering_. Wasn’t it something you told me once?”

“You _fucker_ ,” Flint rasped, with a smile that hovered between hope and the promise of painful retaliation. “Hey. What are you doing?”

“Trying my hand on your cock, of course,” Silver said, summoning his best innocent gaze. “You seemed to think it was a tragic shortcoming of mine, never having done it before.”

Flint, brilliant actor that he was, still had the strength for a smirk and a raised eyebrow. “And now that you’re having a go, do you agree?” he managed to ask.

Silver could feel the tensing of Flint’s muscles as he was struggling not to move in his hand, noticed the vein popping at his throat, and yet his face betrayed nothing. He decided it had to change, because yes, Silver _liked_ the weight in his hand, the expanding, unyielding hardness under the velvety skin, the drops beading up at the slit as he gave a tentative twist. The _power_ he found in searching for the faint evidence of undoing in minute twitching on Flint’s face and in the shivers of his body.

“It has some appeal,” Silver said, thumbing the slit and trying for more rhythm.

“Don’t,” Flint began, inhaling sharply – “oh God. I told you I want –”

“Yeah. I know. But is this only about what you want, Captain?”

“You little – don’t, ah, shit, is it because you’re afraid you can’t perform? I said don’t, _fuck – stop!_ ”

Silver grinned, enjoying the way Flint’s face finally registered his need. “Don’t do it, or don’t stop?”

Flint rose on his elbows, looked down. “You little fucker. You’re humping the mattress, you shit.” He sat up, closed his hand around Silver’s on his own cock, bent to Silver’s ear, kissed its shell, and whispered: “I can promise my arse feels better than a mattress. Want to do it?”

Silver circled his hands around Flint’s body, let them fall onto buttocks he’d wanted to dig his fingers in since he’d seen them hugged by a drenched shirt. “I do,” he said.

His nervousness must have shown because as he bent to retrieve the oil Flint muttered: “I’ll guide you through, all right?”

“How can you –” began Silver, who in spite of everything that had just happened had still trouble reconciliating his image of _Captain Flint_ with the prospect of his own cock in that particular hole. “I mean, doesn’t it hurt?”

“Doesn’t have to,” Flint answered in a voice that had gone down an octave. “And you can actually enjoy it, the penetration. I know I do, I have for a long time, since before – ah. Maybe it’s the filling – the way you – damn, I can’t – you’ll see.” He uncorked the bottle, sniffed it, tilted his head. Cleared his voice. “There’s bound to be some discomfort this time, been so long. I mean on my part. Don’t worry, I can take it.”

 _I can take it_ , he’d said with his voice not quite shaking, and Silver wondered if that didn’t really mean: _I want it_. And he was now wise enough not to ask how long exactly it’d been, or before what, or whom, Flint had begun enjoying being buggered. But he’d never seen him being at such a loss for words; and he had to say the casual admittance that what they were doing wasn’t merely convenient or a habit flattered his pride, and maybe touched what was left of his heart.

And, God dammit, his very entire, very present, very hard cock.

“Don’t worry,” repeated Flint, who had begun coating his fingers with oil. “I’m not mad enough to wish for the _worst_ kind of pain. And so the first secret of a good sodomy –” from his kneeling position on the bunk, he looked over his shoulder, held his hand up and produced a parody of his usual smirk, and Silver couldn’t help his snort – “is enough oil and thorough preparation.”

Flint bent down and balanced himself on his knees and one elbow, twisting slightly to look at Silver and reach behind himself with his slicked hand. Silver didn’t know what he wanted to watch the most, the curiously vulnerable look of concentration on his face or the pale, delicious, offered arse and the obscene finger that had begun circling over its fluttering hole. He could see Flint’s balls between his spread legs, taut against the hard length of his cock.

“Can I –” Silver had to clear his voice. “May I touch you?”

Flint’s finger breached his own entrance, twisted, pulled a little. “Yeah. Yeah, as much as you want.” Flint licked his lips, closed his eyes as he pushed his finger deeper. “Arse is good, yeah, or thighs. Back, too – just please don’t touch my cock.”

Silver complied, trailing his hand over Flint’s, then sliding toward a taut, shivering arse cheek and was rewarded by goosebumps and a soft hiss of pleasure.

“Touch yourself too,” Flint rasped. “Not just your cock. Stomach, yes? Nipples. You’re very sensitive there. Touch your nipples, yeah? God, fuck, you’re a delight to watch. Ah, _fuck._ ”

The last was said with an open-mouthed, prolonged sigh as he pushed another finger in and began working at his hole in earnest. On impulse, Silver pushed his hand against Flint’s, trying to pick up as much oil as he could, and laid his index against Flint’s stretching rim.

“Oh fuck,” Flint grunted. “Yeah. Do it.”

Silver pushed in, meeting some resistance, and found himself at a loss about what to do in that tight heat. Wiggled experimentally.

“Rotate it,” Flint said. “My God your fingers are big, I always wondered what this thick index of yours would – or you just – wait–” and he bore down and began to fuck himself on their entwined fingers.

“Damn,” Silver said, mesmerized. “You sure you need my cock?”

“If you don’t fuck me in this very moment I promise I’ll have you delivered to the nearest English judge. Come on. Come _on,_ Silver –”

“Is it enough? Are you ready?”

“Not nearly enough and I don’t care. Just oil your prick, and well. _Come on!_ ”

Silver looked up at his face to be certain and saw how all masks had fallen to reveal absolute, desperate _need_. He climbed to kneel behind Flint, coated his cock, trailed it across the cleft of Flint’s arse.

Flint threw his left arm behind with a grunt, made a blind grab at Silver’s hip. “What are you waiting for?” he hissed.

Silver pushed and slid in with maybe more strength that he should have, found himself sheathed to his balls. Flint’s breath caught and Silver was sure than in other circumstances he would have howled. As it was he threw his face down right as he was pushing back in full force, and bit his forearm, hard, a kind of muffled whine still coming through.

It had hurt, Silver was sure of it. Flint was tight, tighter than any woman’s cunt, and now, at once, the whole surface of his skin was shiny with sweat. Silver stood still, watching the heaving of that powerful, scarred back, noticing how red and shiny the exit wound on his shoulder still was. But in the next moment Flint cursed, low and urgent, pulled himself half out and slammed back in.

It was not how Silver should have done it. Possibly, it wasn’t what Flint needed. But that was certainly what he wanted, and Silver, who couldn’t hold in for another second, grabbed Flint’s hips hard enough to bruise and _fucked_ him, in long, deep, nearly violent strokes. _This_ was for Flint not acknowledging how Silver had saved his arse. And _this_ for how he hadn’t even thanked him for saving his _life_. _This_ was for how he lorded over them all, keeping to himself like he was miles above the best of them, like he’d live all his life without needing to rely on anyone but himself.

Because now Silver was sure Flint needed him, was sure he needed the hard touch and that fucking maddening friction and the filling of his hole, would have begged for it, begged for more, if he’d remembered how to speak, how to breathe, how to _think_ , was writhing instead, hissing half-formed curses, thrashing, biting anew on his arm, pushing back with all his might. Now Flint was standing up on his knees, bracing with one arm on the cabin wall, reaching behind himself with the other to take hold of Silver’s head – how could he even do it with this shoulder wound so fresh? – pulling hard at his hair, dragging Silver’s face into his neck, making Silver’s whole torso slam into his back and Silver’s cock impale him deeper.

Silver, with the most pressing edge of his hunger already taken off by his previous orgasm, felt like he could have gone on at this punishing pace for a very long time, and maybe he wanted it, the power and the animality of it. But Flint had other ideas, if ideas was still the right word for what was passing through his mind – instincts, rather? He had taken his hand off Silver’s hair and was working his own cock, frantically, panting, his whole body tensing, too starved, too lost inside himself to do anything else than blindly purchasing completion.

Well, that wasn’t what Silver wanted. If he was the only one able to retain control for the both of them, then control Flint he would. He slowed his pace, made his strokes softer, shallower, stilled Flint’s hand over his cock like Flint had stilled him earlier, took joy in the pleading, frustrated, nearly sobbing sound that rewarded him.

“Shhh, Captain,” he murmured into his ear, “you’ve held off coming so beautifully, I’m sure we can make you last some more, can’t we?”

Flint stilled and shivered and for a fleeting moment Silver thought he had fucked it up, pushed him over the edge instead. Then Flint’s hips began to move anew, but slowly, purposefully, fucking himself back on Silver’s prick and forward into their combined hands. He twisted his neck to look into Silver’s eyes, and Silver didn’t know what to trust, Flint’s own eyes, dark and lost and drowning, or the half-smiling mouth that spoke of a control that wasn’t so shattered. They stood like that for a moment that felt like an eternity, Silver’s free arm coming to pull Flint closer, their fucking gone sweeter and paradoxically more intense, Flint’s breathing going deeper and steadier just as Silver’s began coming in shorter.

“Aim forward,” Flint whispered, sounding like words were too much of an effort for his lungs. “Forward and up – and let me come this time. Please.”

This was no surrender from Flint – but it had gone beyond a truce, as if he were putting himself in Silver’s hands, a skilled fighter lowering his sword (though, it passed through Silver’s mind in a flash, the metaphor wasn’t the most apt) and turning his back, trusting his opponent to strike only in the hoped-for manner. And Silver could have ignored it, continued dictating the rhythm and imposing the moves, and it felt like Flint would have followed nonetheless, even taken his pleasure from it. This was the headiest sensation of all: power, not taken by force, but given freely.

And it compelled Silver to grant Flint his request.

He aimed as he was asked, thrust slowly and purposefully, and only remembered why he should have done it earlier when he saw Flint’s small jerk of pleasure, the spasm that started at his groin and climbed, staccato, up to his convulsing face. He did it again, and again, each time more deliberately, until Flint half-collapsed from his assaults, until he felt Flint’s building-up bliss spread to him, until he bent forward to mould himself to Flint’s back and drove inside as deep as he could, his own hand moving hard and fast over Flint’s cock.

Now none of them could talk, Silver pumping in in earnest, Flint with his head cushioned on both his arms, twisted sideways so that Silver could drink in his flared nostrils, the turmoil of his forehead, his teeth sinking into the flesh of his arm so mercilessly he was already bruising.

When Flint came it was with Silver still driving hard into him. He tensed and arched and stopped breathing, threw his head back into the eastern light from the windows, mouth open and teeth bared in a soundless howl. His cock, spurting in Silver’s hand, sent strings and drops of come up to his sun-haloed beard and Silver might have called awe the emotion that took him at the beauty of it all.

“Stay inside,” rasped Flint, collapsing down on the bunk, still wrecked by aftershocks. “Finish in me. I like it.”

Being in such a haze of want didn’t prevent Silver from revelling in how limp the man splayed under him had become, yet how sensitive every part of his body had turned, his well-worked hole squeezing Silver’s cock in rhythm with his still laboured breathing, his whole skin twitching and shivering under Silver’s caressing, kneading, grabbing hands. It gave, if anything, an edge of acute tenderness to the chase for release, and so Silver came with a final deep, deliberate thrust, falling with all his weight on Flint’s sweat-slick body, kissing him on the neck, long and wet, in order not to yell, or to cry.

 

They disengaged, Silver fell on his side, and Flint turned onto his back.

“Lord above,” Flint said, shocked into propriety – or into some earlier, more civilised time.

It made Silver guffaw and then laugh outright. “Fucking hell,” he confirmed.

 

They stayed like that for a long time, unmoving, the sweat drying to salt on their skin, Silver acutely aware of where their bodies were touching – no way to avoid contact on a ship bunk, even one on the large side like this one – Flint with his eyes open and lost in the contemplation of the deep shadows above.

 “Is it late?” Silver asked, still not moving. “I should maybe –”

“Not that late,” Flint answered, sounding slightly sleepy. “De Groot wore ship but only once since you came in.”

“And you noticed that? With –” Silver made a sweeping gesture encompassing their nude bodies and the clothes scattered about. “All of this?”

“Didn’t you?”

“No.”

“You aren’t much of a sailor, are you? Definitely didn’t grow up on a ship?”

Silver didn’t answer. Flint lost himself back into ceiling observation.

Flint used to cuddle to his lovers, Silver remembered Miranda Barlow saying, and so he knew that all of the walls hadn’t crumbled down. Still, Captain Flint lay beside him, sated and exhausted. He chuckled.

“I feel like a fox –” oh, and why sell himself short? He didn’t really see himself so. “Well, like a lone wolf who’s been allowed in a lion pride,” he told the ceiling.

Flint snorted. “A wolf, master thief? That’s how you see yourself? What about – let’s see. There’s this African animal, vaguely wolf-looking, isn’t there, that tends to circle around other predators’ quarries. So tenacious even lions fear it. Would you terribly mind being a hyena?”

“Hey, that’s – fuck, I do mind!”

One side of Flint’s mouth went up. “That’s not an insult. I have nothing against hyenas. As I said, they have wits and courage enough to drive lions away from their prey. And the ancients thought they were highly magical beasts. What do you think?”

Silver shook his head, hoping he hadn’t physically shivered, wondering if possibly Flint could have guessed – but no. No way. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “And you? What kind of animal would you rather be?”

Flint sighed and stretched on the bunk, never more reminiscent of a very big cat. “I never could really play that game. I think – I think I can’t imagine myself as an animal. Beasts, Mr Silver, aren’t capable of sin. Nor are they concerned with fate. Be a hyena or a wolf, a goddamn parrot if you wish, you might have enough innocence left. I’m just a fucking man.”

A veil of anguish, of unescapable sadness and bone-deep exhaustion passed on his features and it jolted Silver into seeing who hid behind the mask of the monster, not the lieutenant he had been, but the man he was. His despair and self-hate, his fight against gods. The execution of Singleton, that was a crime, and Gate’s murder, truly a sin – but Morley squashed under the hull or Billy slipping into the waves, maybe that was fate, cruel gods playing at granting a man’s wish. For the first time, Silver realised he was prepared to accept that Flint hadn’t wanted to kill them – maybe hadn’t tried at all.

Flint groaned and sat up, the mask back in place, except for some lingering sadness in his eyes and a hand coming to rest lightly on the trail of dark hair on Silver’s stomach.

“I – I’m not trying to be impolite,” he began, “but I – believe me, I’m _thankful_ for this, more than you can imagine, but I – think I need to be alone.”

The hand lifted, the tip of its fingers still trailing down Silver’s belly and vanishing up just clear of his exhausted cock, which still twitched with misplaced anticipation.

Silver rose and walked to the washbasin, very aware of Flint’s eyes on him. “I understand,” he said. “May I…”

“Sure.”

Silver made a quick work of washing himself and went to retrieve his clothes.

“What happened here has no bearing on anything we do on the other side of this door,” came Flint’s voice. “I don’t owe you anything.”

“Of course,” Silver said, surprised to feel the pang in his heart at the same time as he was flooded with relief – Flint’s current, after all, could still release him. “Anyway, our lives will part tomorrow, won’t they?”

Flint grimaced. “One way or the other, isn’t it. But in any case. This is finished.”

Well and good, Silver thought. Or he’d come to tell Flint everything about the gold out of sheer fascination and – friendship, maybe.

He reached the door, turned back.

“Thank you, Flint,” he said, the plain surname feeling more intimate than any use of a Christian name. “For – all of this, I guess. Guiding me through it – not judging me. Offering me this.”

Flint smirked. “I’m not a judge. And thank you, Silver. For giving me back a part of myself.” He nodded and looked down.

“Godspeed, Captain,” Silver said, and passed the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since I've begun adding a baroque soundtrack, what about [Bach's Partita for solo violin from the Chaconne in D minor?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqA3qQMKueA) Not sure either Silver or Flint would have enjoyed it though...
> 
> Hope you liked! Please tell me what you thought, I'll love you forever.


	3. Flint - reacquainting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Miranda confronts Silver and Flint confronts Miranda, or maybe the other way around.

The door closed and James Flint kept his eyes on it, revelling in a degree of physical satiation he might not have felt in a decade, right as he was trying not to let his mind overflow with feelings he didn’t want to confront. His eyes drifted to the wooden partition with the captain’s cabin, to the precise area where a plank had been fitted too green and had dried twisted, leaving a comfortable slit one could use to spy through.

If he didn’t feel able to begin to guess at his own motivations, he had more than an inkling of how this peculiar – fucking upsetting, heart-piercing, arse-ravaging, fulfilling – interlude had been made to happen. Come to think of it, there was another stealth opening in the planks, this one between the great cabin and the exit corridor, and Miranda was bound to want to confront Silver. She was not someone to hide her machinations and had pursued such meetings in London, not to gloat but to share her joy in finding connexions between people catching her interest – whether from lust, friendship or love. She had wanted James to see Thomas through her own eyes, early on, and now it seemed that she wanted Silver to see James.

Granted, it had been so long that Flint might be mistaken – but it seemed that the both of them were cracking open a window on their former lives, as clumsy and painful and misguided as it felt.

“Mrs Barlow!” came the exclamation from the corridor, Silver’s alarmed voice.

“Mr Silver,” Miranda’s voice answered. “I trust I find you well?”

“Huh. Splendid, Ma’am,” Silver let out in a strangled tone.

“I couldn’t help noticing where you exited from. I hope your meeting with the captain went equally splendidly?”

This didn’t sound like the Miranda of their first meetings with her plain, straightforward delight at making James understand Thomas. Nor even with her later complicated contemplation of the great, perhaps too exclusive love that had unfolded before her eyes. Here, there _was_ some gloating, a somewhat perverse mirth. There had to have been some attempt at manipulation on Silver’s part – and this was her way of making him know he wasn’t the only one skilled at it.

Flint stood up from the bunk, took the time to find another shirt – the soggy one on the floor would have to be rewashed, and he dropped it beside the washbasin and its dubious water – and tiptoed to the hole in the corridor wall.

He had a good view of Silver if a bad one of Miranda, and the poor guy looked thoroughly fucked indeed – in several ways, and Flint felt a definitive stirring at the idea below. God, that beard burn was unmistakable.

Silver must have had the same thought because he raised a self-conscious hand to his face, then turned the gesture into his habitual defensive one, both arms up in front of him.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s not do that, all right? Yes, it went splendidly, and what exactly did you guess?”

“I feel,” Miranda answered sweetly, “that it is I who should be congratulating you on _guessing_ enough. Don’t you think? And on having done what you wanted with it, which was my counsel if I remember right. Unless you did what _he_ wanted?”

Oh, but Silver _could_ blush under that tan. Flint, who remembered only too easily heating up under her all-knowing gaze, back then in London when he’d thought himself shrewd and had been so naïve, could sympathise.

“Oh, what I wanted. Definitely what I wanted. I, uh. I think. He –”

Flint caught Miranda’s small nod, her encouraging huff.

“James _is_ a disconcerting man, isn’t he?” she said. Flint heard an echo of the same enthusiasm she had showed at the window of her carriage, when her whole being had lit up as she was singing Thomas’s praises. She had to be remembering too and he hated her a little for it. For not letting those memories lie. But pity soon overcame annoyance, followed by grief at having been the cause of their fall, and then, overwhelmed with a sudden surge of acute tenderness, he couldn’t help admire her, for her spirit, her resilience, her will to go on.

God. No one more than her deserved to be loved.

“Even when he relents control,” Miranda was going on, “it’s still a way for him to reach his desired end. I don’t even know if he’s aware of it! I think… I think that when he lets go, even without reserve, there’s still something at his core that holds on. Upon my soul, it’s breathtaking to witness. And combined with such a mind… Mr Silver, I never saw a man think faster, or more able to turn around a desperate situation. Don’t you agree?”

“Yeah,” Silver muttered. “Yeah, guess so. He sure…”

He let his voice falter, but Flint could only think that she was wrong, that when the situation had been at its lowest and most desperate, he had done fucking nothing. Could not save anyone, certainly not _Thomas_. Not even himself. And worst of all not Miranda, whom he had sentenced to a lifetime of being buried alive on an island she hated, among people who didn’t understand her, in a place where all of her wit, her unparalleled thirst for life, her radiance were lost.

Silver’s eyes were darting from the cabin door to Miranda and back to the door, and he finally shook his head.

“And here I thought I was so clever. You tricked me into fu- visiting him, didn’t you?”

Flint hadn’t much of a view to see how Miranda reacted, but that was enough. He opened the door.

“That wasn’t a trick. I made you see him,” Miranda said at the same time. “At least I hoped I could. And I’m glad you did.”

 _What had she told him_?

“Miranda,” Flint said. “Please. I – let him go.”

“Fucking hell,” said Silver, sounding halfway between laughter and horror. “Captain.”

“But you _are_ clever enough,” Flint told him. “I know for sure that Miranda didn’t lay everything bare. You did leave him some guessing, didn't you, my dear?" he asked Miranda, who had the gall to smile, before turning back to Silver. "And she must have thought you were somewhat special. As it would seem I have, to my surprise and worry. Because neither Miranda nor I would do this for sport.”

But Silver looked only wilder. “You knew,” he said. “When I entered that wretched door, you fucking knew she’d –”

“I didn’t. When you asked me that question I was shocked enough to consider –”

He paused when he saw Silver’s face, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it flash of fear. He realised he was scowling – toned it down just a small notch and finished: “– scaring you. Very, very much.”

“Oh, I was scared all right.” Silver cleared his voice, looked down, then up. “At first.”

“Well, so you asked that question and I realised there had to be something… I made a guess.” Flint smiled to Miranda, who shifted and came to stand beside him. Her hand lifted to brush his arm and rest on his wrist, a light, practised, proprietary gesture that reminded James of how caressing and casually possessive she’d been with Thomas.

“But _I_ couldn’t guess –” Silver began. “I haven’t even begun to guess how it really _is_ between you both, have I.”

Miranda opened her mouth to answer, maybe to hint at more, and Flint had to lift a warning hand.

“No,” he said. “You haven’t. And now, Mr Silver, I’m sure there are many places where you’d rather be at the moment.”

Silver tilted his head and produced one of his cheeky grins, but his hand came up uncontrolled to touch again the flushed, scraped skin around his mouth. He had muscular, powerful-looking forearms – he had muscular everything, truly, although in exact opposition to how most pirates acted, he went to great lengths _not_ to advertise it. And a beautiful prick, too – quite big. Flint’s arse was still aching, in a good way – he had forgotten how it made one feel, that bliss after a very good, long, no-prisoners fuck. It made one _care_.

Well, if Flint had shown more of himself to Silver than he would have thought safe, then maybe Silver had, too. A good thing, for the both of them, that this wouldn’t have any bearing on their lives past the next day.

Silver nodded and looked down again, at Flint’s bare legs, at the hem of his shirt.

“Certainly,” he said. “Thank you, Captain. Ma’am –”

“Have a good day,” Miranda said to Silver’s retreating back.

 

“Come,” Miranda said, turning back to the great cabin entrance. “James? Will you come in?”

Flint shook himself back to the present and followed her inside. Watched her take possession of the best chair.

“Apologies, Miranda. I, uh. Have to wash.”

“Again?”

“Guess why.”

Thankfully, he had hauled in another bucket of water – the idea of an expedition to the barrel, with the crew’s eyes on him and him having to play that role, felt daunting. He went to retrieve the washbasin, took off the second shirt, turned around the desk to throw the soiled water out. Strategically left the basin on the far side of the desk, filled it in, began to clean up.

“My god, James,” Miranda said with a fond chuckle. “What a prude you still are.”

“Beg you pardon?” he grumbled.

“Hiding behind the desk, when I’ve seen all of you. We fuck, for God’s sake. I disrobed you. Washed your wounds. Washed you whole, even, once or twice when you stumbled into my home without any wits left to do it alone.”

“For fuck’s sake! I know. I’m ready to bet you even watched us fuck right now. Doesn’t mean a man hasn’t got a right to wash his goddamned filthy arse in peace.”

He finished as fast as he could, and was ashamed to realise he was trying to keep his bare groin hidden behind the desk while fishing for the nearest pair of underclothes. A prude, yes. Which Miranda, their sparkling, bold, free spirit had never been; and he loved her for this. These puritans of Nassau who feared her for her wildness, these fucking London gentlemen who scorned her for her looseness, couldn’t they see she was the noblest of them all? They, who looked down on commoners and thought their own narrow-minded, choking morals were the mark of blue blood, how grey, sad and small they had seemed compared to Miranda, whose birth was higher than any of them, who could trace five hundred years old Norman blood in her ancestry, and who hadn’t given a damn, whose nobility made her free of constraints instead of adding more, who saw everyone as they really were and whose contempt as well as love, given freely in return, were always just.

If what they strove to accomplish in Carolina could bring her back some measure of this freedom and agency that was such an inherent part of her being – and that he saw now he had stolen from her – then it would be enough.

He smiled apologetically at Miranda as he joined her, put on the shirt she was handing him. Didn’t mean he didn’t feel somewhat safer now that he had, finally, a complete layer of clothing on himself – he made a note never to open a door, any door, anymore unless he was fully clothed.

“How are you?” she asked. “How do you feel, I mean?”

He chuckled but it sounded much too hoarse. His voice wasn’t yet recovered from his exploits with Silver – and he himself was not either, possibly.

“Well enough,” he answered.

“James.”

“Dear God, Miranda!” he exclaimed, then felt too much anguish welling up to keep it in. He sighed, shook his head. “I feel like my limbs have been numb for ten years, and now the blood’s just flowing back in. Fucking _hurts_.”

He caught her very small moue of annoyance – but no. It was worry, he thought.

“Why Silver?” he asked. “Of all the men you could have singled out? Why did you do that?”

“That?” she echoed. But she saw the look he sent her and sighed. “You were looking at him, James. I thought – I saw James McGraw peek out of Flint’s façade, yesterday at the tavern, and I thought he – _we_ had to stop being mired in the past. That we had to live again!”

“And so you tried to do, what. What you used to do with Thomas, before I came into the picture? Find us both a lover?” He knew he sounded tired, sad. Not angry. He could see it reflected in Miranda’s wide, maybe wet eyes.

“He’s not my lover,” she said. “But I did want…”

Her voice fell, leaving her thought unfinished, but he could guess what it had been about. Part of it was that she did care for the satiation of his physical needs – god knew they both cared for each other’s, and both worried that they weren’t enough now that Thomas was gone.

 _Thomas_. The physicality of him, of his surprisingly wide shoulders, of the smoothness of his skin under James’s calloused fingers, _of the sure strength of his grasp on James’s cock_ , was becoming more tangible than it had felt in ten years.

Flint forced himself to come back to the present. Miranda had wanted to see him fucked, obviously, although a lot of it had probably depended on Silver’s sharp mind and his ability to connect clues. But another part of is was her trying to connect back to the preciously short months they’d had together in London – to act as if it still could be rebuilt, or to find a witness to who they had been, maybe.

“How did you think it would work out?” he asked. “I’m not Thomas. Silver’s not me. Of all the men… Do you realise how perfectly, totally untrustworthy that son of a bitch is? Would betray anyone, fuck-mate or not, as soon as his interests turn that way.”

“He has a heart, though,” Miranda said with one of the sad, inward smiles she so often wore these days.

Flint nodded. “He does. And he’d betray his heart, too.”

Which, he thought, made Silver particularly dangerous, because it conferred him a kind of stealth magnetism. You wanted to touch this heart, see whether, and how, it would still react, see how it would conflict with that keen, amoral intellect of his, and see, in the end, how said intellect would surely win.

“All the better that we leave all of this behind us soon,” Miranda murmured. “I thought this was what you needed. Some connexion, yes. And a very good fuck. You certainly looked like a man getting what he needs earlier. And him, too.”

“But I’m not Thomas!” Flint nearly yelled. “God fucking knows I could never be him! I don’t have the heart he had, fuck, there’s no room for so many, no room at all!” He realised he was in Miranda’s arms, on his knees at her feet, her bending down to hold him, and him sobbing into her breasts. “Fuck,” he rasped, “just got buggered so hard by Silver and it just brings Thomas back, Miranda, I can’t do it. I miss him. Miss him so hard.”

“I miss him too,” she whispered into his hair. “But he’s dead, James. Oh God.”

“I know,” he moaned. “But I still love him. I can’t help it. I can’t stop it. Christ, I’d do everything to –”

Bring him back, he had nearly said, and right now he would have walked into Hell for this, even climbed up into Heavens where he had no right to ever stand, to fight angels and tear Thomas from their grasp, to bring him back where he belonged, with them, on this earth. Did Miranda want the same? Did she want to fight for him, too?

“Would you have fought?” he heard himself ask. “When we fled, had you been a man, would you have fought instead?”

She laughed, and it sounded ugly. “Had I been a man? If I were a man, James, maybe none of that would have happened. Maybe you wouldn’t have been needed. Maybe he would have loved –”

She stopped abruptly with her voice hitching up in horror. He felt frozen.

“Lord,” she said. “James, no. I’m sorry. Please, forgive me! It never was a question of me being a woman and his wife or being a man. As soon as Fate had made him know you, whatever the conditions of your meeting, he’d have been yours.”

“And I his,” James said. “But he loved you, Miranda. You know this. And I love you too.”

She was the one crying now, and he could only hold her tight and cry with her.

 

In this position, with his arms straining up to hug her, his shoulder was screaming murder. He sighed, wiped his eyes discretely on his arm and stood up to reach for the second chair and bring it close. They sat side by side, arms and legs touching.

“It _was_ a very good fuck,” he said. “God, I feel… That’s unfair, that I should have this and not you. Do you want me to take care of you?”

She laughed again, sounding more like herself this time. “James, my dear, nothing was unfair. I’m _glad_ you could have this! Even with all the attached baggage. And believe me, the one of us who’s had the highest number of good fucks lately is definitely me.”

“Yeah,” he mumbled. “The pastor, huh?”

“Ah. Not really what I would call _good_ , that one.”

"Not Underhill?" he asked in horror.

"Definitely not Underhill."

He leaned sideways to pull her onto his shoulder.

“I can still take care of you, if you wish.”

She huffed. “You would do it for me, not for yourself. Thank you, James. I don’t wish it.” She held up her hand in front of her face, smiled behind her splayed fingers. “ _I_ took care of myself.”

He took her hand and kissed it – the scent of her own pleasure was unmistakable and made him smile in turn.

“You and Silver were inspiring,” she whispered. “Very.”

She angled up her head and took his lips, like she had done in her carriage so many years ago. And for the first time in many years, guilt, shame and loss didn’t stand between them as they kissed. He opened for her and let her take the lead, no lust in them but a healing kind of grief, and a celebration that they were still standing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Honestly? I can't find a contemporary soundtrack because I just rewatched 209 and my mind is full of the song they used. [Leonard Cohen's Avalanche as sung by Nick Cave](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VikEC1ZZLC0). Can't decide if it suits Miranda or Flint better. Both, together?
> 
> In the immortal words of Edward Teach:  
> "It was a settled notion that in order to join a crew of any repute, one had to prove his worth.  
> Now all a man need to do is say 'please'."
> 
> Nonetheless: if you've read up to this, please, please comment! I want to join the crew :)


	4. Epilogues - freedom

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Years pass. Thomas reappears.

Later – weeks later, that feel like years – Silver wakes up missing a leg and finds his captain turned a monster, shaving his hair, his eyes not empty but burning. It’s been said that Miranda Barlow had stolen his soul, but Silver knows that she kept watch over it and that it might well have died with her. She had remembered him as a sunrise – he’s a sunset now, painting the sea red as he sinks, drowning everything in blood and plunging the world into darkness.

There’s nothing further from Silver’s mind than fucking this vengeful ghost of a man. Gone are the hints of the lieutenant of old; but gone, as well, anything of the man Silver thought he had unmasked, his wit and his desire and the flash of his smile.

Often, Silver wonders why he’s not running away. Rarely, when he’s tired and grieving and beyond hope, he tells himself that he can’t run with just one leg.

Sometimes he remembers a woman who fed tomatoes to her man, healed his wounds and lit his steps, and tricked a master of tricksters. Then he hates the world for killing her and tells himself he’d follow Flint into Hell to avenge her.

Other times he’ll watch his captain and search for the man he glimpsed. Sees the hands that pulled his hair, the shoulders that shone with sweat in the morning light as Silver pounded into him, the mouth that rounded so perfectly around Silver’s cock. He doesn’t want that anymore, he doesn’t think he will ever again, but he wants back the man who wanted it. He tells himself he wants a friend.

But the truth is that when Vane’s man brought an axe to his leg, he had a flash of Flint in the belly of the Spanish Warship, steeling himself not to talk, and for just a moment too long he couldn’t do anything less than his Captain. Flint chose not to talk for the sake of a ship, Silver for the sake of a crew. And now he finds that sacrificing himself made him care. He stays for them.

Or the truth is even simpler: nobody jumps into the ocean when the ship is sailing through a hurricane.

 

*****

Much later, Captain Flint finds himself again – or maybe Silver fishes him from the murky depths of his despair, or that’s Madi who shone so bright, and so nearly like Thomas, that he could but follow the light.

Some masks have melted away, others have stuck to him so hard they became his skin. He understands now that McGraw and Flint are the same man and not clothes he could discard at will – the lieutenant, the pirate, both as alien to the fisherman’s grandson he once was. Both still miss Miranda horribly – and both, and each and every person he thought he was, and all of his being, still love Thomas as if he still were just beyond the next turn, the next fight, the next war, as if Flint could make one sacrifice more and find him.

Flint, and McGraw within him, still fights to avenge Thomas. In battle, his rage still burns white and desperate because of Miranda’s murder. And if he can’t make his dearest ones real again at least he’ll try until his last breath to bring his lover’s dreams to fruition. But in the process, somewhere, in Charles Town as he moved in unison with Vane, sharing his resolve and his cold anger, on the Walrus as he watched his drive reflected in the eyes of his men, in battle as he saw a pain and a passion stronger than his own in the eyes of Madi’s people, he’s taken Thomas’s goals and reshaped them into an aim that is truly his own. This war is Madi’s, whether she’s still alive or not; it is Flint’s. He wonders if Miranda, who thirsted for freedom and revenge but not for the end of civilisation’s yoke, would call it hers. He wonders if Thomas would call it just.

He knows he does.

Miranda may have been the last thread that bound him to civilisation, he thinks when he’s had too much time to himself. She made their fight personal, never universal; longed for music and polite company, and nearly convinced him he had his place there; made him able, by her mere presence and support, to keep a distance between the pirates and himself. But Miranda freed him in Peter Ashe’s dining room, burnt all her bridges, turned a pirate herself. Died for it. Put him on this other path.

And now Silver is his witness, the crews and the pirates his kin, the slaves his brothers in arms.

It’s easier, he’s sure of it, with Silver at his side, Silver who, he thinks, believes – whose loyalty he doesn’t doubt anymore, whether to himself or to their men and allies. Silver who maybe burns with the same rage.

Silver who is his friend and not his lover.

 

Then he witnesses Madi come back from the dead and Silver run to her. They kiss, and it closes a door he hadn’t realised was still open.

He’d be at a loss to name the emotion that claws at his chest. Some of it is envy: the love he witnesses here is as absolute and binding as what Thomas and himself had, and the pang of loss nearly fells him.

Some of it is relief, unless it’s regret: he’s honest enough with himself to know that as he was torn off from the contemplation of death, as Silver stood by his side, he’s longed for a more intimate touch, remembered carnal pleasure. He’s wondered whether a friendship so deep wouldn’t hide another sort of attraction, right when he’s also known that none of what he feels for Silver would ever fill the hole of Thomas’s absence. And now that Madi is here, alive, in love, the conflict in his heart abates. Had he opened to romantic passion with Silver, he’d have become the Miranda to their great love, and he knows that he doesn’t possess an ounce of her selflessness and nobility of heart. That he wouldn’t have withstood it.

And some of it is joy: at the bliss of the two living people who are closest to his heart, at witnessing a future. He knows his own promises only violence and death. But he’s certain now that from this violence a new world will grow, one with Madi to dream it and Silver to build it. It had been his hope for Thomas and himself – it feels good to see it reborn.

He decides that this emotion is, indeed, hope.

 

***

Even later – after the end, or is it a new beginning? they leave the plantation behind. Now the only walls they see around is the ones they agreed to build, and there are no guards standing with aimed muskets as they kiss. If Thomas ever digs his hands into soil again it will be because he wants it.

They don’t live so far inland that anyone would mistake an oar for a shovel: the sea was in James’s blood before Captain Flint and even long before the rise of Lieutenant McGraw. When the longing becomes too much to bear, he’ll go, and Thomas will sometimes sail with him, sometimes wait ashore – never long.

Nor are they so far removed from Madi and Flint’s war, even though it’s not fought in great battles anymore. Rather in stealth smugglers’ boats with escaped slaves hiding in the balls of tobacco, or in Thomas’s artfully crafted false letters of emancipation, and one memorable time in the freeing of Anne Bonny from the Jamaica prison where she was about to hang. They brought her to Max, together with both the babes – Mary Read’s and hers, and Anne told them, cursing and crying, how they were both by Jack, now six months hanged.

They fight their war with words and tales as well, so that other truths are still heard beyond England’s spreading lies. One day, James Flint sails away and comes back with a very exact, very colourfully drawn map of their old treasure. He leaves it where Billy Bones lurks, so that the legend lives – so that, maybe, Billy doesn’t (Flint is still not a nice man).

But who cares whether their names are Flint, McGraw, Hamilton or Barlow, or even Bonny or Rackham or Guthrie or Vane or Rogers or Teach? They use whatever name they hold dear, sometimes whatever name they want to besmirch, or whatever won’t remind others of dangerous stories. What matters in the end is Thomas and James, learning to remember and know each other, when the only certainty is how love has endured and grown between them.

“Did you have other men, when we were sundered?” Thomas asks one day.

They’re still sticky and hot and emotional from lovemaking, so James doesn’t misunderstand.

“Did you?” he asks nonetheless. Part of it is that Flint will still parry and defend in any situation, trying to create an opening into the other’s walls before opening himself. Even when the other is Thomas.

Part of it is that Thomas doesn’t talk easily of those years, and that sometimes James is very afraid of what might have happened then – some of the nightmares aren’t going away.

But Thomas’s smile is open and only slightly sad.

“At the plantation,” he says, and the very tiny, reassuring shake of his head is to tell James that nothing monstrous – nothing in the line of a man forcing himself upon him at least – happened before that. “A few times, all of them inconsequential. As you saw, there were many men of our – persuasion there. None of them that stirred anything beyond a passing physical need. James, what about you?”

“Same,” James begins. “A few meaningless fucks. Rare. Wouldn’t do it where my crew could know. In other ports, away from Nassau, and not with just anyone either. I didn’t want to bring back anything nasty to Miranda.”

Thomas’s hands come to grab both his biceps, squeeze hard and pull him close. Warm breath ghosts on his neck. A kiss.

“And…” James makes himself add.

“And?”

“One meaningful time.”

“Really?” Thomas asks with something like delighted disbelief – he never was a jealous man, James is once again reminded. And the both of them couldn’t be surer of the other’s love. “It takes great restraint to fuck someone meaningful only once.”

“It was Silver.”

“The fucking shit who had you delivered to the plantation chained and beyond broken? _That_ Silver?”

Thomas doesn’t swear often, and James, who wasn’t that tender either when he told him of Silver before, wants both to assure Thomas that he’s better – that everything’s all right – and to somewhat find excuses for Silver – if excuses is the word.

“I did the breaking all by myself, mostly. And he brought me to you,” he says. “Anyway it was long before that. But after he saved my life. We were still mostly strangers by then, and he was, ah. Someone hidden behind so many disguises that you really wanted to crack them open.”

Thomas’s eyebrow lift manages to be at once quite suggestive and softly encouraging. He might disapprove of Silver, not that James will hold it against him, but he will always approve of James’s wellbeing.

“Did you?” he asks. “Crack him open?”

James smirks. “The other way around, actually. Lord, my arse ached for days afterwards. Good kind of ache.”

“Yet you didn’t come back to him.”

“Not in this way. Even then I knew he was a dangerous man to, ah, open to. And that one time… _Christ_. What I found in my heart when it unfroze was you.” He chuckles. “And then I lost myself, and when I came to we became friends. You know he fell in love with Madi.”

There’s pity in Thomas’s gaze now, which James dislikes. Longing, too, for all the years lost, which echoes in James's heart.

“You know,” James says. “Right until –” Christ, it’s still hard to say – “until he betrayed me, I used to think our fucking had been a lot like our friendship was. Fighting to take the lead, all the time, but trusting each other – and we’d both relish the times when we surrendered, strangely. And then he used that to destroy everything.”

Thomas grimaces, then sighs and seems lost in his thoughts for a while. Then he licks his lips.

“Think I would have liked watching it, this fucking of yours?”

James feels himself colour, which of course Thomas notices. Fingers come trailing over his flushed chest.

“You know I never was as brazen as you and Miranda, for this,” he mumbles. “Anyway. She certainly enjoyed it.”

“Miranda did?”

“It was all her doing. You can say she pushed Silver into my arms.”

“Good Lord,” Thomas whispers, a strange heartbroken heat colouring his tone. He licks his lips again and James wants to kiss them. So he does. “Think you could tell me about it?” Thomas asks. “In details?”

James knows he’s turning tomato red by now, doesn’t care. His cock is stirring again which frankly he didn’t think possible after all they’ve just been doing. He grins, hoping he doesn’t look too unsure, and pulls Thomas alongside him. Presses his reborn erection against his hip.

“It began with Miranda sitting all by herself in Eleanor Guthrie’s tavern,” he begins, then stops for a sloppy kiss. “I’m sorry, Thomas. ‘s going to be tedious and introspective before it becomes arousing.”

Or so he hopes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here it is. Hope you liked!  
> While you're here, consider leaving a comment? I'll love you forever.
> 
> Soundrack : for Thomas, the better known companion to Lascia la Spina, [Lascia ch'io pianga](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWD8d_YL30o) as sung by Philippe Jaroussky, countertenor.


End file.
